David Brooks, New York Times columnist and target of internet ridicule, recently took a friend to lunch. This is what he wrote about it in his column: “Recently I took a friend with only a high school degree to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop.” What happened next was a gift that a week later continues to give. Brooks’s friend, “confronted with sandwiches named ‘Padrino’ and ‘Pomodoro’ and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette”, had some sort of working woman’s panic attack, whereupon our hero “quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican”.
Brooks was making a point about how new class divisions in the US are marked less by conspicuous wealth display than subtle signifiers like knowing the names of posh sandwiches, but of course that wasn’t the point that was seized on, and among the many parodies that followed was, “Recently I took a friend with doctoral degree to lunch. Insensitively I led him into a McDonald’s … ” You can imagine the rest.
I rather like Brooks, who writes with the dogged, slightly puzzled air of one who can never quite put his finger on why people are laughing at him. Apart from the business with the sandwich, the column was a sensible summary of The Sum of Small Things, a book by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett in which she argues that as Americans increasingly marry within their own social class, upward mobility stalls.
What interested me more was the idea of American class indicators graduating from the cliche of vulgar “new money” to more discreet signals – faddish exercise regimes, fussy parenting techniques, references to the “right” books and TV shows – in other words, a much more European understanding of how class barriers work.
In fact, it hasn’t, quite. The examples given by Brooks and Currid-Halkett, while they suggest a more coded approach to class signalling, are still rooted in expensive logos and Ivy League educations, and feel approximately 500 years off the inverse snobbery of the British system. In certain contexts in Britain, of course, ignorance betrays “high”, not “low”, status; when the earl in the shabby old jumper boasts of how thick and useless he is, he is advertising the fact that his forebears going back to Edward the Confessor have never worked a day in their lives.
New York herd instinct
Brooks has a long way to go before reaching the absurdist heights of Thomas Friedman, his fellow columnist at the New York Times, whose tangled metaphors and contradictory images have fuelled an entire sub-category of journalism. Here’s Matt Taibbi, in Rolling Stone in 2009, delivering his famous takedown of Friedman’s style by chronicling every disastrous sentence in his book The World Is Flat. Two highlights: “I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.” (“Name me a herd animal that hunts,” writes Taibbi, not unreasonably.)
And: “Now the icing on the cake, the ubersteroid that makes it all mobile: wireless.” One suspects even Brooks would be thrown by the presence of Ubersteroid Cake on the menu board.
Having her cake
The place Brooks should have taken his friend was that great social leveller, beacon of democracy and increasingly dying business, the New York diner. Rising rents in New York are pushing more and more diners out of business and a city-wide grieving process is under way.
I went to one in my neighbourhood last week, and it wasn’t hard to see why they were disappearing: sitting beside me at the counter was a grumpy old lady who ordered two pieces of toast, which came to less than a dollar, and which she chewed for an hour. The owner brought her a piece of cake on the house. All barriers tumbled.
