The Week in Review section of yesterday’s New York Times introduced something new into mainstream American journalism: postmodernism.

No, David Leonhardt’s lead article isn’t an impenetrable, jargon-riddled verbal rat’s nest, and it has no references to Baudrillard or Foucault. What it does is pose the question Who are the rich? and strongly suggest that the answer is unknowable.

Consider the following excerpt:

Some would include [among "the rich"] any family that makes more than $100,000 a year. Others put the cut-off much higher, noting that a six-figure income alone is not enough to buy many houses in the biggest metropolitan areas. Still others ignore salaries and point out that all of the commonly used words for the well-off — affluent, rich, wealthy — are supposed to describe people's assets rather than their incomes.

Now, you thought being paid gobs of money made a person rich. But merely being paid gobs of money (income) is, apparently, not at all the same as having gobs of money (assets). Apparently, one may receive gobs of money without in fact possessing those gobs of money. Following me so far? Good.

Then there’s this:

One possible reason the class-war criticism has not yet stuck is that defining wealth is more complicated than it once was. Some people have homes that have appreciated enormously in value, but they can't sell them without buying a new, similarly expensive home. High-earners who live in high-cost areas feel stretched. Lower earners who live in less expensive places don't feel poor.

At this point, the article starts to seem as if it were written specifically to be turned into a Tom Tomorrow cartoon, with one of Tom’s average American husbands saying to his wife, "Say, honey, we went to Hawaii last year and our Visa bill is almost paid off -- maybe we’re rich! Maybe Bill Gates isn’t rich! Maybe homeless people are rich and Jack Welch is poor! Maybe money is merely a collective hallucination!"

Yes, the end of the Leonhardt piece does suggest that some people are knowably rich (and that those people have done awfully well over the past twenty years, and may continue to do extremely well if the Bush tax cut passes intact). But this comes only after we’re told that "rich" is a baffling, elusive concept.

Given the fact that pomo theories are usually regarded as commie-liberal, it’s interesting to note that the Week in Review’s postmodernism serves the interests of conservatives quite nicely -- after all, if we can never truly know who is rich, then all those class-warfare whiners are tilting at windmills, fighting a chimera. (The right-wing reaction to that same chimera is to throw lots of money at it, just to be on the safe side, but apparently that's OK.)