Middle Class Anxiety, Part II

*Sorry for the delay. I moved out of Alvin's glorious DSL mecca, where no less than six surrounding houses provided wireless internet to my Centrino-enabled signal-siphoning laptop whenever his (unreliable) Earthlink carrier went down. I am now back at home in Whittier, where I am trying to convince my parents to get with 2005 (2006-almost) and get some kind of high speed--or really, any speed--connection.

Anyway, as I surveyed the months of that calendar, thoughts not unlike those of H.L. Mencken (as he observed the houses of Pittsburgh) entered my head: It is as if some titanic and aberrant genius, uncompromisingly inimical to man, had devoted all the ingenuity of Hell to the making of them. They show grotesqueries of ugliness that, in retrospect, become almost diabolical. One cannot imagine mere human beings concocting such dreadful things... I wondered who would furnish a plastic woman with luxuries unknown even to most of the sybarites of the gospel of prosperity. My first feelings of quasi-revulsion were quickly followed (as are most of my initial emotions these days) by the realization that this would make for an interesting blog.

As I exited, another calendar caught my eye: Anne Geddes. "Oh, Anne Geddes," I lamented, "in your work it is possible to behold the impending destruction of our fair nation." I am opposed to animals in clothing--it's unnatural. It's creepy. And (again, unless they live in a severely cold region and are hairless) it probably makes them uncomfortably hot. Against babies in clothing I hold no such prejudice: clothed babies are generally as acceptable as the nude variety. However, I do feel that babies ought not be dressed as other things (with the possible exception on Halloween).

And here were babies in the counterfeit of all number of things: babies as bumblebees; babies as pea-pods; babies as wisteria; babies as Dom DeLuise. It is one thing to parade a baby as something unnatural; and while one is at it, she might as well take a snapshot, because who doesn't like photographic evidence of her perverse treatment of infants? But to sell those photos? For other people to buy them? This must fall under one of the laws proscribing public indecency, right?

The willingness of consumers to spend their money on Anne Geddes merchandise must signal that capitalism has produced an overabundance of wealth and placed it in the hands of the truly stupid. The middle class is now so well provided for that it is free to squander its money in ways previously reserved only for the upper echelons of the socio-economic ladder.

And what of my assertion of the middle class's newfound "predilection for all things mean and base"? I do not think it necessary to provide very much more evidence beyond Paris Hilton's ascension to stardom. On one hand, she is the heiress to the multi-billion dollar hotel chain (and has provided a useful role model to prodigal aspirants), but in the end, she's just RWT--rich, white trash. She's "girls gone wild," with a few extra zeros at the end of her IRS forms. One associate labeled her "the most useless person in the entire world." Her popularity signals a regrettable shift away from the praise of virtue, toward the celebration of turpitude. But Paris could be an entire entry unto herself, so I'll reserve comments for another day...