Exactly six months ago, Maureen and I moved from Shelburne, Vermont to Naples, Florida. There were many reasons for this move and it has proved to be beneficial in most of the ways intended. There is, however, the serious problem of culture shock. Vermont is the land of nature, conservation, moderation, and independents. Naples is the land of artifice, waste, excess and is the belly of the beast of the republican 1%. Where in Vermont one most frequently encounters the animal and the vegetable, in Naples it is the mineral – cement. The environment is virtually an entirely man-made, Disney-like, agglomeration of cement roads, malls and houses and virtually all faux-Italian.
The letters to the editor of the Naples Daily News, while they may contain an occasional rational, and even liberal voice, are for the most part ignorant, hateful, chapter and verse recapitulations of the latest rant by Rush Limbaugh or some Fox News “talking head.” In Naples, the 1% are the Titans, and the OWS people are the lazy, unwashed “hippies” looking for a free lunch. Little wonder that Newt, who advised the OWS people to “take a bath and get a job,” is very popular here as is the flaxen-haired, perfectly coiffed, stylishly-dressed, slim and bejeweled Callista (for reasons that will become apparent below). It is in this context that I had the epiphany described below.
As My dog Beau and I stood outside a Lenscrafters store in Naples waiting for Maureen, who was picking up a new pair of reading glasses, a woman walked by us. She was one of what I have come to call the “Naples Salon Woman,” the most notable artifice in Naples. She had a totally salon-fabricated blonde coiffure (they are always blondes), a professionally-painted face, and body-shop quality shiny toes and fingernails. She also carried a $4000 “bag” and wore high heel shoes that probably cost about $600-$1000 – they were a marvel of style and engineering. I could not begin to estimate the value of the jewelry and clothing she was wearing, but it was surely in the tens of thousands, not including the diamond-encrusted Rolex watch, I think that is what it was, but I am hardly an expert on such things. When Maureen Dowd goes on about high fashion in her columns in the New York Times I have no idea what she is talking about.
It was also difficult to tell how old she actually was because she probably has had skin treatments, and Botox treatments, and face-lifts to hide the age-wrinkles. These were also surely supplemented by regular spa treatments, and expensive creams. She did not get close enough for me to detect a scent, but I would bet there was one and it was expensive (maybe the one that the recently wed royal bone yard wore for her wedding). Her body was covered with clothing (it was a cool evening), but I think it safe to say that the body she had was sculpted with the help of a personal trainer, had also been “tucked,” implanted, and liposucked in all the appropriate places. While surely not one of the “lampshades” (so thin that light shone through them) Tom Wolfe mocked in Bonfire of the Vanities, she did exemplify the old saying, “one cannot be too rich or too thin.”
It suddenly occurred to me that these salon-women are the real “job creators.” While their men are busy destroying manufacturing jobs by the millions in the United States, these busy little queen bees are creating service jobs by the millions. In addition to a legion of aestheticians, hair stylists and colorists, personal shoppers, cosmetic surgeons, personal trainers, masseuses, nail-painters, sales people in high fashion shops, the people that design and care for their multiple homes, pools and gardens, the cooks that shop for and prepare their food and the maids that serve them, the Nannies that care for their children, dog-walkers, the security guards at the gates, the tennis and golf coaches, the “boutique” physicians that watch their health, the cosmetic dentists that cap their teeth, and last, but surely not the least, the wealth management people who do the investing and “tax avoidance” to insure the party never ends.
Perhaps the most egregious expression of the salon-woman is the “charity gala.” These parties are run by the foundations these wealthy people use to avoid paying taxes for generations, if ever. Ever more important than serving the needs of the needy group served by the charity is serving the need of the salon-woman to spend a small fortune polishing up the trophy wife in a decadent display of highly competitive conspicuous consumption. All of which is a small price for a mention, or even better, a picture on the “society” page. The (one time only) gown, the saran wrap and the colonic to take off a few inches to fit into it, the jewels, the shoes, the coif, the nails, you know the drill. Then, of course, there is the food prepared by gourmet chefs (that the women do not eat), the profusion of expensive wines and liquors, the elaborate designer table settings, and the often star-studded entertainment.
I would be remiss if I did not mention the fact that the “charity” served by these galas are more often than not Museums of various kinds, or Operas, Philharmonics and such. Occasionally a real charity may be involved. When such is the case, why not, one asks, just skip the gala and give the money directly to the needy? The answer is jobs, jobs and more jobs. The needy, some of whom may be waiting on tables, or bussing them, or washing dishes, parking the cars and other service-based menial jobs, need the jobs no matter how trivial the social needs of the wealthy being served by these parties. There is no vanity benefit to writing a check to support a homeless shelter especially when one is of the opinion that the homeless are merely the most stupid and lazy among the generally inferior working class. Better to give them a job.
Of course, I have not said anything here that Thorstein Veblen didn’t say nearly a century ago in his magnificent book, The Theory of the Leisure Class. In the leisure class women have always been the gilded and polished adornments that validated the husband’s preeminence among the predators in his class. Most of what the rich spend is conspicuously wasteful as it is spent serving the need of their vanity and nothing else. The wealthy in Naples, and elsewhere, are exemplars of such shallowness.
The job-creating-salon-woman may be the reason so many low and moderate income people tend to support the political agenda of the wealthy – they know their jobs depend on serving the wealthy few. If, for example, Florida were to institute an income tax, and the Federal government started taxing wealth appropriately, and if America should begin to take democracy seriously, Naples might revert back to the lovely small town between a swamp and the Gulf of Mexico that it was when I first visited in 1975. A town where the roads, now six lane rivulets of concrete, were paved with crushed clam shells. The wealthy will simply move to foreign parts untaxed, and unregulated by a cumbersome democracy, that is, they will secede from the union as it were, leaving the servant class behind. As they have already done this with the manufacturing businesses they control, it is just another small step to personally secede.
Many years ago, Christopher Lasch coined the phrase “revolt of the elites” (those who control the international flow of money) to describe what he felt was the dangerous isolation of the privileged class; it lacked any loyalties to its locality, be it neighborhood, state, or region. It is just a short step to add “nation” to the list to make for a complete secession. Elites already have so much wealth stashed overseas it will be a relatively simple matter to move what is left. One can be sure that they will find a friendly Junta somewhere to welcome them. If one does not exist they will create one. Investing so much wealth in the hands of so few not only leads to a massive waste of resources on vanity spending, it raises the real specter of elite secession, with serious consequences if they are not served well. Some would describe this event with the relative benign term, “capital flight” when it is actually the severing of any connection to the body politic of this nation. In other words secession. Noblesse oblige, if it ever existed, is dead.