/lit/ - Literature

>>21564235
>To lesser minds, these are instances of hypocrisy, but to the class that has managed the rare feat of arrogantly wielding its own influence to solve the great problems wrought by its past influence, hypocrisy, practiced correctly, by the right people, is the dialectical motor of true progress. To eager readers of New Yorker fiction about the superficial, frigid lives of readers of the New Yorker, it takes a thief to catch a thief, much as it takes opaque intelligence agencies to guarantee an open society. And huge corporations to rein in capitalism. And on and on and on and on. Like a vintage Carly Simon album abhorring the leisure-class depressives whose children helped turn her records into hits.

>“Liberal guilt,” conservatives used to call this, and some of the proudest liberals of the era plead guilty-as-charged, proving the accusation at the same time they paradoxically, dialectically, and (to plain-thinking types) maddeningly transcended it. It has since become their favorite magic trick, placing signs of welcome to minorities in front of houses few minorities can afford to purchase but often visit – as gardeners and maids. These homeowners clearly wish it weren’t this way, of course, and one hears they are working to correct things by pressuring their vastly wealthy colleges to admit the children of their servants so they too can someday trade derivatives, move to Scarsdale, and quietly die inside.

>Though maybe the new guard won’t suffer like the old guard. Maybe the reason the Wheelers and their ilk were so unhappy in their leafy enclaves was that they suspected in their progressive souls that others deserved the good luck they found so numbing. Maybe their anxious sorrows were those of people doomed to maintain the roofs and yards and driveways that history, slowly tracing its arc of justice, would eventually award to mortgage-holders (or renters from Blackrock-like financial giants) more capable of feeling joy and gratitude.

>It’s certainly a theory. But Yates’ novel and countless others like it don’t support it in the least. In Revolutionary Road, the dolor of the enlightened, liberal couple – the dolor the Wheeler’s real-life peers so love to savor in stories about their class – stems from a rather simple source, one that still abounds today: fantastical entitled narcissism. The Wheelers believe they are interesting people, or potentially interesting people, and that their town, their country, and the whole system have stunted their souls and starved their intellects. Yates, their creator, suggests this isn’t so – the Wheelers are living exactly as they’ve chosen, in America’s dreamy, steady-income shallows – but his characters know this only dimly. Mostly, they just hate themselves. And in this they resemble their counterparts today. Perhaps the only class in human history that loathes itself on principle while pushing its principles on everyone else.