TOTALLY GEEKED!

In the morning they asked her, “Did you sleep well?”

“Oh!” said the Princess. “No. I scarcely slept at all. Heaven knows what’s in that bed. I lay on something so hard that I’m black and blue all over. It was simply terrible.”

They could see she was a real Princess and no question about it, now that she had felt one pea all the way through twenty mattresses and twenty more feather beds. Nobody but a Princess could be so delicate. So the Prince made haste to marry her, because he knew he had found a real Princess.

As for the pea, they put it in the museum. There it’s still to be seen, unless somebody has taken it.

— Hans Christian Andersen, “The Princess and the Pea”

In days so ancient that it apparently has not found its way onto the Internet, there was a magazine ad for a sports car — I cannot remember which marque — consisting of a photo of a beautiful piece of automotive architecture over the caption: “Don’t you wish you’d worked harder in school?” In spirit, it was something like that terrific Cadillac ad with Neal McDonough, in which he scoffs at Europeans for taking all of August off rather than taking two weeks. (I am afraid that McDonough is going to spend his life suffering from Mark Hamill Syndrome: Put him in a Cadillac commercial or Captain America, I still see Robert Quarles.) Other civilizations are big on karma, arete, martial codes of honor, virtus, etc.; we Americans have “Work hard, live well, enjoy good stuff,” which might be sneered at by philosophers and warlords but is nonetheless the best and most humane organizing principle a human polity has yet discovered.

I miss the days when the important status symbol could be something so simple as a Cadillac.

There is some truth in the usual criticism of that sort of shallow materialism, as voiced by Chuck Palahniuk: “You are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You are not your f*****g khakis.”

But he forgot to add: “You are not the emotional health of your poultry.”

Tinkering with the organic, spontaneous orders of human society is a tricky business. In the 1960s, the Western world got it into its collective head that traditional social arrangements, especially family arrangements, were an instrument of oppression that needed to be torn down. And we set about tearing them down, without giving any thought to what would replace them. We were confident that whatever came next inevitably would be better, and about 80 percent of our current domestic-policy initiatives are in one way or another aimed at dealing with the fact that what came after wasn’t better — that it was brutish and frequently cruel — without ever being so gauche as to notice that that’s the case.

Similarly, the old status symbols — the nice house, the car, the sensible two-week family vacation — might have been bound up with a brand of unthinking and insalubrious materialism, but they were also bound up with some important virtues that we are in the process of rediscovering: thrift, frugality, delayed gratification, etc. That is, in fact, why status symbols work as status symbols: It’s not just having the Cadillac or the gold watch — it’s being the sort of person who earns them. When you see an 18-year-old college freshman driving a new Mercedes roadster, the car functions as a sort of anti-status symbol, denoting not someone who has worked hard and done well but instead someone who is coddled and quite possibly headed toward a life of disappointment.

But we are not supposed to want those things any more: The Cadillac commercial referenced above was in fact roundly criticized. Writing in the Huffington Post, Carolyn Gregoire scoffed: “There are plenty of things to celebrate about being American, but being possessed by a blind mania for working yourself into the ground, buying more stuff and mocking people in other countries just isn’t one of them.” Adweek, of all publications, complained that the ad was “obnoxious,” “painfully annoying,” and “poorly timed.” Apparently, the keen minds at Adweek are shocked that the impulse toward conspicuous consumption might have something to do with the brand identity of Cadillac — Cadillac, mind you. Ludacris might entertain some novel uses for his Escalade, but the rest of you good, virtuous Puritans are not supposed to aspire to that — you’re supposed to get a Prius and use it to lug home your organic vegetables.

The New Royals
Princesses, peas, and the emotional needs of chickens

Angry Birds (Elifranssens/Dreamstime)

 

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Kevin D. Williamson

In the morning they asked her, “Did you sleep well?”

“Oh!” said the Princess. “No. I scarcely slept at all. Heaven knows what’s in that bed. I lay on something so hard that I’m black and blue all over. It was simply terrible.”

They could see she was a real Princess and no question about it, now that she had felt one pea all the way through twenty mattresses and twenty more feather beds. Nobody but a Princess could be so delicate. So the Prince made haste to marry her, because he knew he had found a real Princess.

As for the pea, they put it in the museum. There it’s still to be seen, unless somebody has taken it.

— Hans Christian Andersen, “The Princess and the Pea”

In days so ancient that it apparently has not found its way onto the Internet, there was a magazine ad for a sports car — I cannot remember which marque — consisting of a photo of a beautiful piece of automotive architecture over the caption: “Don’t you wish you’d worked harder in school?” In spirit, it was something like that terrific Cadillac ad with Neal McDonough, in which he scoffs at Europeans for taking all of August off rather than taking two weeks. (I am afraid that McDonough is going to spend his life suffering from Mark Hamill Syndrome: Put him in a Cadillac commercial or Captain America, I still see Robert Quarles.) Other civilizations are big on karma, arete, martial codes of honor, virtus, etc.; we Americans have “Work hard, live well, enjoy good stuff,” which might be sneered at by philosophers and warlords but is nonetheless the best and most humane organizing principle a human polity has yet discovered.

I miss the days when the important status symbol could be something so simple as a Cadillac.

 

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There is some truth in the usual criticism of that sort of shallow materialism, as voiced by Chuck Palahniuk: “You are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You are not your f*****g khakis.”

 

But he forgot to add: “You are not the emotional health of your poultry.”

Tinkering with the organic, spontaneous orders of human society is a tricky business. In the 1960s, the Western world got it into its collective head that traditional social arrangements, especially family arrangements, were an instrument of oppression that needed to be torn down. And we set about tearing them down, without giving any thought to what would replace them. We were confident that whatever came next inevitably would be better, and about 80 percent of our current domestic-policy initiatives are in one way or another aimed at dealing with the fact that what came after wasn’t better — that it was brutish and frequently cruel — without ever being so gauche as to notice that that’s the case.

Similarly, the old status symbols — the nice house, the car, the sensible two-week family vacation — might have been bound up with a brand of unthinking and insalubrious materialism, but they were also bound up with some important virtues that we are in the process of rediscovering: thrift, frugality, delayed gratification, etc. That is, in fact, why status symbols work as status symbols: It’s not just having the Cadillac or the gold watch — it’s being the sort of person who earns them. When you see an 18-year-old college freshman driving a new Mercedes roadster, the car functions as a sort of anti-status symbol, denoting not someone who has worked hard and done well but instead someone who is coddled and quite possibly headed toward a life of disappointment.

But we are not supposed to want those things any more: The Cadillac commercial referenced above was in fact roundly criticized. Writing in the Huffington Post, Carolyn Gregoire scoffed: “There are plenty of things to celebrate about being American, but being possessed by a blind mania for working yourself into the ground, buying more stuff and mocking people in other countries just isn’t one of them.” Adweek, of all publications, complained that the ad was “obnoxious,” “painfully annoying,” and “poorly timed.” Apparently, the keen minds at Adweek are shocked that the impulse toward conspicuous consumption might have something to do with the brand identity of Cadillac — Cadillac, mind you. Ludacris might entertain some novel uses for his Escalade, but the rest of you good, virtuous Puritans are not supposed to aspire to that — you’re supposed to get a Prius and use it to lug home your organic vegetables.