THE RAREFIED WAY SOME OF US LIVE NOW

For all its flaws, I root for The New York Times to survive (or at least to outlast the nihilist Murdoch empire). But I have nothing good to say about the tendency of certain Times writers to write as if everyone in the United States is a cosseted member of the upper-upper middle class. I realize that's the paper's market, and if the arts or food coverage, say, reflects that tunnel vision, that's a minor offense. But when that attitude shows up in the more serious sections of the paper, it's offensive.

If you want to know what I;'m getting at, go read today's "The Way We Live Now" column by Judith Warner. Warner looks out into her small, rarefied, upper-upper world and concludes that there's been a widespread expectation in American society that the severe recession we've been going through could have been a good thing:

... despite [the] bleak reality, some talk persists of silver linings: less cash to spend means less materialism, a real change to "the definition of living well," as Jim Taylor, a vice president of Harrison Group, a market research firm in Waterbury, Conn., told The Times as the big banks melted down in the fall of 2008. At that time, unemployed Wall Street dads were said to be discovering the unexpected joys of domesticity. Minivan moms in the summertime learned that days at the public beach were just as rewarding as playing tennis while the kids improved themselves at foreign-language camp.... "There's a new level of social coordination," says Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University, relating to me how parents of his acquaintance recently agreed to a multilateral halt in the escalation of kid-birthday-party madness in favor of back-to-basics cake and balloons. "In some areas of our life we’re resetting. Over time, we may get de-escalation."

This glass-half-full narrative, the popular trope that the Great Recession will ennoble us by purging us of our excesses, has, as its reference point, the Great Depression -- or a certain idea of the Great Depression. After all, we've been told countless times, the Depression put an end to the libertine individualism of the flapper age: families stayed home and played Monopoly, finding strength and sustenance with one another. Missing from this rosy picture, however, historians point out, is the fact that, as Steven Mintz, a Columbia University historian puts it, "they had no choice." ...

Did you ever have a "rosy picture" of the Great Depression? Me either. Perhaps that's because my parents and in-laws and other older people of my acquaintance actually lived through the Depression and can talk about what it was really like -- but I don't think that's the sole reason. I think I never had a "rosy picture" of the Great Depression because I didn't grow up well off, and thus never really experienced the conspicuous-consumption arms race Warner writes about; I don't feel I had to be forced away from consumerist excess by an economic cataclysm and, more to the point, I don't think the most important aspect of the economic cataclysm is the end of my economic subgroup's ability to wallow in excess. For heaven's sake, large numbers of people have been driven to long-term joblessness, bankruptcy, and even homelessness by this downturn -- the key economic fact of this moment is not how much they pay for kids' birthday parties in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Warner simply doesn't get that. In her obliviousness, she goes on to write sentences like this:

What the Great Depression was actually like -- mostly wretched -- and how we frequently choose to think of it -- as ultimately redemptive -- are two very different things.

Who is this "we" who think of the Depression "as ultimately redemptive"?

There's more:

Our nostalgia for the Depression speaks volumes about how we feel not just about the past but also about our lives today. A craving for a simpler, slower, more centered life, one less consumed by the soul-emptying crush of getting and spending, runs deep within our culture right now. It was born of the boom, and not just because of the materialism of that era but also because of the work it took then to keep a family afloat, at a time of rising home prices and health care costs, frozen real wages and the pressures of an ever-widening income gap.

Again, who has nostalgia for the Depression? Conversely, what evidence is there that "a craving for a simpler, slower, more centered life, one less consumed by the soul-emptying crush of getting and spending, runs deep within our culture right now"? In certain economic strata, maybe. In the culture as a whole? Hell no.

Warner is correct when she talks about the so-called boom and "the work it took then to keep a family afloat, at a time of rising home prices and health care costs, frozen real wages and the pressures of an ever-widening income gap" -- but an ordinary person's response to that is to want things to be easier, to want stuff to be more accessible, not to have the craving for a paring-away that's a privilege limited to the well-to-do. The non-well-to-do don't feel they've gotten enough, and feel they were running twice as fast to get half as much as the privileged even when times were allegedly good. They don't want a deemphasis on pie -- they want their slice, especially if they never got it when times were allegedly good.

Warner does eventually arrive at the conclusion that severe economic downturns are bad for people -- but she seems amazed by this conclusion; she regards it as counterintuitive. It must be nice to have too much and to see having too much as your main problem with regard to the consumer culture. But please, Judith, don't assume that everyone in our society feels the same way.