Letter 2 America for April 2, 2013

Dear America,

I started to write to you this week about last week, when the Supreme Court entertained argument about whether to endow homosexuals with the same right that everyone else has to sanctify a monogamous relationship and the Rcc (Republican conservative complex) seemingly turned the tide on sane regulation of guns...away from sanity.  But on Friday, I read David Brooks's column in which he extolled the paper of one of his Yale students for its insight into the prevailing state of mind of the modern college student.  The senior opined that the events of the past decade--the 9/11 murders and the murder of our economy by the privileged few in the years immediately before and including 2008--had led to a cynicism in the generation next up in the capitalistic batting order, whom she denominated "Cynic Kids."  They are committed to inertia because of cynicism about change because the empirical evidence that such change will improve their lot does not exist, she wrote.  Of course, all I got from his article was Brooks's limned version of the paper, but what I saw was enticing.  In essence, the student was saying that between George W. Bush and Jamie Dimon, the next generation of Yale graduates...otherwise known as the A list...have been paralyzed by doubt that they can get what they want just by working hard and being loyal members of the team.  She thinks that the current form taken by our putative "meritocracy" requires that one devote himself entirely to his own success because diverting one's attention to the needs of others has what she calls an "opportunity cost."  Apparently she has just noticed--and it is understandable considering her youth--that in the modern economic ecology, the only way to climb the ladder is over the backs of others.  That's a very severe pruning of her ideas, but what is salient in my mind is all there.  Apparently at Yale, the students of past classes have been under the misimpression that everyone can be a success if only he will try hard and show up everyday.  It seems never to have occurred to anyone at Yale that if such were the case, we would all have yachts, but Brooks's student, young Victoria Buhler, has now turned a New Haven corner in the name of all Yale students and caught a glimpse of the real world...that the rest of us have been struggling in since Ronald Reagan was president.  She has enlightened Yale, and her alumni professor too apparently, as to the fact--not just the statistic but the fact--that the middle class hasn't gained an inch in thirty years even though the vast preponderance of the work that supposedly leads to success is done by them.

What I'm getting at is that the sanguine basis of conservative policy is a myth.  We can't all succeed by simple virtue of the numbers.  Someone has to do the work while those who succeed in Victoria Buhler's newly recognized system spend their summers in The Hamptons.  For someone to be able to take meetings on the golf course, someone else has to stay at the office to answer the phones and still others have to design and create the products that turn into the profits of which they never partake.  Yes Victoria, there is a Santa Claus.  He just doesn't go down everyone's chimney.  But I suspect that what Ms. Buhler sees as cynicism is really something else.  The conservative mantra about hard work and the fruits of one's labors being so pervasive in our thinking as a nation, we all heard the siren call as young people, and most of us never questioned it until we found that in reality it isn't so.  That usually takes the better part of a working life, not just a few salad days at Yale.  Now, however, even those who have the benefit of the Ivy League behind them are finding that all of the low hanging fruit has been picked by the Wall Street wizards and the self-proclaimed beauties who are famous for being famous.  Without daddy's money, money is hard to come by.  And the Ivy Leaguers who in the past have needed only to achieve high B averages in order to benefit from emblazoning their resumes with the names of their alma maters are now finding that the people who review those resumes are more likely to say how impressed, but sorry they are than they are to offer six figure starting salaries.  As the upper class shrinks, the classes below it get bigger, and more and more of the former get painfully introduced to the travails of the latter...and the truth about real life becomes ever more plain to them.

What I think Ms. Buhler is actually seeing is not cynicism.  It is the grim realization among her once idealistic peers that to get ahead, it isn't enough for one to sell his labor, creativity, energy and fealty.  Today, it requires that one sell his soul; the method most likely to be successful in acquiring the material prosperity that is so openly enjoyed by the lucky few is to do so at someone's else's expense.   It is no longer Horatio Alger who instructs us on the virtues of capitalism.  It is Goethe.  To become prosperous today, you can invent something or cure a disease.  And perhaps you can excel at a sport or be exceedingly talented or beautiful, though even then, you have to be lucky.  But if none of those is your lot, well, the odds are against you.  What Brooks's young prodigy is seeing in her classmates is not really cynicism.  It is the dismaying realization that today, the most likely way to succeed isn't to sell an idea or your labor.  It's to sell your soul.  And for secular humanists, some of whom apparently still go to Yale and associate with Victoria Buhler, that is a daunting prospect.

Your friend,

Mike