#11 Class rage and hypocrisy

Eat the rich and blue cheese

Hello my dear ones,

Happy Friday!

This week, like many others, I’m very bloody late and just a little worried. Honestly the title of this newsletter would also work as, Sorry I’m Worried. 
The thing is, when I’m writing honestly and openly, I worry that my writing might offend someone I love, or that I might one day regret some stupid thing I said only to have it written in indelible ink on the internet. In small ways, this has already happened.
So the largeness of these fears is starting to feel more valid and slightly less silly.

The problem with fear though, is that it keeps you quiet and ultimately for me, as a writer it causes me to soften the blow, water down.  

All that to say, this week I’m talking about my very own awkward and problematic feelings about super rich people. These are feelings rooted in hypocrisy (I am a rich person as far as the world and all it’s poverty is concerned) and perhaps jealousy. But also, I can’t stop thinking about them and the way they make me feel, so I wrote about it.

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I grew up in a small town. It’s beautiful there. The kind of emerald, undulating place that’s always a bit wetter, greener, cooler. Dirt roads, gums; apple orchards and a fat lab out the front of the bakery. Hemmed in the distance by a choppy cold sea.
That’s what it was like when I was a kid, anyway.

I went back recently and saw that it’s still as beautiful as ever. As green and rolling as always. The supermarket I worked in as a teen is still there. The florist, the bakery, the chemist. The house my dad built.
But it’s changed, too.  
You can’t get a park at the supermarket for starters. The place is choked with Porsches and Range Rovers, sometimes if you’re lucky, a Tesla. Artfully flecked with just the right amount of mud. Women with huge sunglasses and rabbit fur vests. Pursed lips and pearl earrings wobbling in their gently shaking heads.
Young couples with matching androgynous linen aesthetics stalk the supermarket aisles in the spring heat. Boat shoes and carefully cut hair. Shiny and soft. Their baskets brimming with bottles of Pét-Nat and hunks of blue cheese. So clean and understated. So careful and smart. Their golden oodle dog outside, barking anxiously on a patent leather lead. They’re escaping Kew. But oh, they brought it with them. 

In this way, everything about the town I grew up in feels like a playground now. The wineries, the biodynamic produce, the cliffs festooned with glistening mansions, the art galleries and cheeseries. It’s all there to be enjoyed by a very specific type of person. Staged and coiffed and rippling, like a racehorse in the hold. Waiting, waiting. 

I drive behind a Porsche Cayenne doing 20 kilometres under the speed limit and I simmer with peppery rage.

This feeling is not new. I remember when I was fourteen, working at the supermarket and each summer hordes of rich people would appear. Just as the clouds started to clear and the cherries hung fat and shiny in the orchards.
Suddenly those large cavernous houses with big blue views would be inhabited once again. Sandy pathways winding quaintly from their door to the crisp Bass Strait. Rolling green lawns and aquamarine pools, rose gardens and fountains. Popping corks on the deck.
And there I was, sweating in my pilled polyester uniform, my name tag hanging loosely. Nervous and smiling. I recall their sharp enquiring voices, the way they would sometimes ask for their receipt and then run their finger down the paper, the way they might stay on the phone laughing, while I scanned rillettes wrapped in waxed paper and tubs of Ricketts point ice-cream. Slippery-wet bottles of champagne. 
I felt like I was working for them. Like everyone in town raced and tip toed, and dance monkey danced, to make the place lovely for them. For their summer.
And then winter would come, and they’d hand the place back, cold and muddy and quiet.

My feelings are just that, feelings, and really a barely audible squeak in the scheme of far worthier revolutionary sentiment. After all, what right do I have to feel this way? I am thoroughly middle class. I’m white. My parents drove a second hand Subaru. I went to a private high school. Am I throwing stones from a shoddy glass house? Or, can you really critique the picture if you’re actually kind of in it? Standing on stolen land?
I don’t know.

Yesterday, I woke to a Melbourne photographer’s revelations of being a student at a notorious single sex school where boys wear ties and striped blazers. A place that I can only imagine is designed to educate and cultivate a very specific type of man. Toxic masculinity, the power of men, the power of white rich men who can do what they want. The way we draw circles of safety and adoration around people who have nothing but luck to thank.
Perhaps part of the problem is that these places are funded and protected by the people who went there before.
In the Guardian, I read that in the UK, “in the 10-year period to 2017, more than two-thirds of all millionaire donations – £4.79bn – went to higher education, and half of these went to just two universities: Oxford and Cambridge.”
and
“British millionaires in that same decade gave £1.04bn to the arts, and just £222m to alleviating poverty.”
The rich get richer (and art) and the poor get small change.

You might have seen AOC’s Met Gala dress, emblazoned with red letters, like blood, that said TAX THE RICH. Detractors from all sides lambasted her, sent her death threats and perhaps worst of all, dismissed her behaviour as tasteless.

But AOC takes an important and deeply uncomfortable line of questioning: what, or who, gives? And is it enough?
In the US, where AOC wants to tax them, a survey asked financial advisors why their wealthy clients don’t give more. The top response was that they “would not have enough money to leave heirs.” The second response was “not enough money for themselves” and third was “clients don’t consider themselves wealthy enough to give.”

I see that as we ride this grass roots-y, burning blazers, tax-the-rich wave, we’re trying to gently shirt front the upper class.
Even as they drive drunk and crash cars and hold on, white knuckled, to their positions of power in leafy suburbs.

It’s 2021. And actually, you don’t own the place.