“Are we middle class?” my eight-year-old daughter Ella asked me.
“Yes. Why?”
“At camp, when I told one of my cabin mates we don’t have cable TV, she said we must be really poor.”
“What did you say?” I asked.
“That we just don’t think it’s worth the money, but she didn’t believe me. She wanted to know if we don’t have a phone or refrigerator, either.”
Later that day, Ella watched me pull the New Yorker out of the mailbox. The cover showed a ship like the Titanic sinking while men in tuxedos smoke cigars and drink champagne in a lifeboat, laughing at the demise of the suckers left behind.
“What’s that mean?” she asked.
I explained how we’re “all in the same boat,” the middle class and poor people, as the rich escape the recession unscathed, even better off. “The gap between the very rich and everybody else has never been greater than before the Great Depression,” I said, quoting my economist husband.
I showed Ella the book her dad was reading, Winner-Take-All-Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. Since we don’t have the distraction of cable TV, I should be able to find time to read this book and give Ella numerous examples of how that New Yorker cover is a picture of twenty-first century America.
But all you have to do is read the newspaper—with stories daily about how companies selling $250,000 playhouses and renting private jets for summer camp visits are booming—to see that the very rich are weathering the shipwreck of the recession.
“Why doesn’t somebody do something?” Ella asked.
It’s hard to explain to a child why income inequality is allowed to grow unchecked. But I tried: “Because it’s in the best interests of the very richest people, and they have enough money to buy political influence.”
From her face, I could tell it wasn’t what she wanted to hear. Ella is a patriotic girl, wrapped up in a halter dress that looks like a flag. I thought she wanted her country, like her parents, to remain infallible, at least for a few more years.
But maybe I was putting too many of my thoughts in her head. “What I meant,” she said. “is why can’t we get cable TV?”
Well, if you don’t have cable TV, then when you are traveling and you stay in a hotel that has cable TV it’s GREAT fun. All those shows! All those movies! But if we had cable at home to watch all the time, one of the great indulgences of travel would lose its magic.