The white folks, at least. As for blacks, Hispanics, and Asians, well, they don’t make the cut in Chuck’s new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, mostly because they foul up the banal set of clichés that Chuck wants to throw at us. Chuck’s whole point is that in 1960, we were all one, and of course if you have to count blacks, we weren’t, so Chuck just tosses them out. As for Hispanics and Asians, there weren’t enough of them to matter back in ’60. Now they’re 20 percent of the population or more, and, apparently, keeping track of them all is just too much for Chuck to handle.
If you don’t feel like spending good money on Chuck’s new book, well, I don’t blame you. You can read a short version here. Chuck splits white folks into two populations, the Belmont folks (top 20%) and the Fishtown folks (bottom 30%). What happened to the middle 50%? Well, I guess Chuck couldn’t come up with enough cheap jokes about them to make it worth his time.
Chuck pretends that back in the day Belmont and Fishtown folks lived the same kind of lives—ate the same food (e.g., not muesli and yogurt for breakfast), watched the same TV shows, and drank the same kind of beers. Damn cozy back then!
But of course it wasn’t. One of my cousins, at age 10, was a far better sociologist than Chuck. Returning from her first summer camp circa 1960 (a “progressive” camp, of course), she observed “Everyone at camp is just like us. They don’t believe in God and put brown sugar on their cereal.”
Yes, Chuck, brown sugar matters. Belmont folks played golf and tennis, and Fishtown folks did not. Fishtown men got paid in cash every Friday, instead of a bi-weekly check, which they probably couldn’t have cashed, because they didn’t have bank accounts. All too frequently, they got drunk on Friday night and came home to beat up their wives. Belmont guys didn’t beat up their wives, not as much, at least, and frequently got drunk at home, drinking martinis in winter and gin and tonics in the summer, rather than boilermarkers in a bar year round.
Belmont folks today? Well, most of them don’t have lap pools in their homes, Chuck’s fervorous imagination to the contrary, nor do they take two or three trips abroad “every year for business, conferences or eco-vacations in the cloud forests of Costa Rica.”*
Back in 1960, Catholics, largely Fishtown folks, went to Catholic schools, where they were often taught by nuns with ninth-grade educations. They were not permitted to read authors like Montesquieu, or Galileo, or Darwin, or Marx, or Martin Luther. They were taught that the Jews killed Christ. Fishtown folks in the South went to segregated schools and when they went to church on Sunday they were taught that segregation reflected God’s plan for the races. The fact is, Chuck, we’re a lot more integrated now than we used to be. And that includes the blacks and the Hispanics and the Asians!
Afterwords
Chuck’s book has a 25-item questionnaire along the lines of “What is Branson?” intended to make you feel guilty for not knowing who won the Firecracker 500. I was going to make fun of it, but why bother? Don’t read the book and don’t read Chuck.
*The cloud forests of Costa Rica, Chuck? Really? The cloud forests of Costa Rica? Where the fuck did you come up with that one?
