The impenetrable NYC Bubble

 

Funny as hell and deadly serious

Let me begin on a note we can all agree on. There is a time in our teen lives when we imprint on popular music. What we were listening to during the dramatic changes in our bodies, social lives, and aspirational identities stays with us, regardless of what we come to value and treasure later in life. Everyone has those certain songs that are foundational chords in their lives, and they respond physically to even a few notes of the recordings that gave rise to their libidos and, well, self. Two not unrelated things. This is a constant and nothing new. There are Sinatra imprints, Elvis, Beach Boys, Dylan, Motown, Beatles, Stones, Who, Doors, Bowie, Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, Pink Floyd, James Taylor, Michael Jackson, Phil Collins, James Brown, Rick James, Springsteen, Metallica, and on and on and on imprints. (Apologies to the imprinters in Country, Disco, Jazz, and Blondie/Madonna Pop, have my own chords there too.) I never judge those. We just all have them. We all have more than one. They’re just the nest of emotions that surrounds the most vulnerable early years of our lives. And, obviously not all the imprints are superstars. Everyone also has hits heard too often heard on car radio, bad songs that were too catchy to forget, and what the hell, I liked it at the time and will never forget it. 

And, just as obviously, this imprinting phenomenon is not limited to music. It takes in a lot of factors. Especially in closed communities. The movies make this a melodrama for us. The extent to which the years of high school in particular shape our future lives, the continuing hurts and resentments we live down by besting the popular cliques of jocks and cheerleaders who wind up as gas station attendants and fat fussy disappointed bitches we want to show up at the reunion. 

I missed all that. This post shows you where I was instead. And the difference is important. It explains why New York thinks it can look down on the whole rest of the nation. Why there is a bubble bringing down the nation without even thinking about it. They are not exempt from the rule cites above about primary identity shapers. What they are exempt from is the comedowns associated by real life as experienced in high school reunions. Their losers are not gas station attendants and fat peevish ex-cheerleaders. They are just dead in place in still perfect clothes and poses. And they are not thinking about it at all.

We have one important clue. A book published back in 1980 called The Preppy Handbook. NYT bestseller. Hilarious. Passed around. You’d think it would still be alive on Kindle at least. No. That would be déclassé. Only available as original copies, ranging from $150 to $500+. Why I have to show you pictures of pages, which will do. They show you a community apart, one I happen to be very familiar with. And why I’m the only one who can explain to you why the NY-centric lawfare against Trump can continue despite the exorbitant costs it will exact on what was once the greatest city in the world.

Here’s the bubble that contains the fiftyish New York elites who live with each other, can afford to buy the essentials and luxuries, and just look down on Trump because he’s about the only punchline they have left in otherwise blank carbon-copy lives of one another. Everything he’s ever done is just not done. He went to an effing military academy before going to the most grinding industrial unit of, uh, Penn…

What you really really can’t have is your own Boeing 757 and a gold plated toilet.

Just so you don’t get the idea They’re uneducated or not well read.

A really big thing is knowing how to look like you’re not trying, 

even if you really aren’t. Sweaters are IMPORTANT.

Overall, you gotta look good. In these particular ways…

How else are you going to marry her and live on the Upper East Side.

Not like they weren’t always preparing themselves for leadership…

Born to run absolutely everything with taste and Topsiders.

 

 Yeah. A 40 year old imprint. They’re in their 50s now. Has anything changed?

How do I expect you to look at all this? I was there. The book names names. Lots of them. Not mine. Which helps me define not resent. There is a community of the top 30 or so schools that survives everything. It’s not even Exeter and Andover, the media version of prep school Harvard and Yale. They are, well, not exactly our kind. We’re talking society here. I keenly remember, with outstanding incredulity, a graduate of Moses Brown School(?) in Providence RI calling NJ’s literarily famous Lawrenceville School a “3rd rate prep school” at a time when Lawrenceville had more Harvard admissions than any single Grottlesex School in New England. 

The sin? Absence of a magnetic epicenter in the urban northeast, which excludes Philadelphia and therefore U. Penn as well, because, well, you, know, who’s just better? The definition of the Bubble, which is what Fitzgerald was really talking about way back when in Gatsby:

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

 

What kept them together? Sweaters and shoes and drunk nights on Nantucket and conventions they still believe amount to taste, like no PDOA, but otherwise doing what they want without being indiscreet enough for others to see. And continuously looking down or at least past everyone else whose lives might have a different kind of center.

 

Am I making a mountain out of a molehill? No. The people described in The Preppy Handbook went to affordable schools in their time. In those days Exeter had a tuition of $1,800. My school had a tuition of $2,700. Today it costs $66,000 to attend my prep school. The middle class is gone from these student bodies. Now we are back to the 1930s, when only the richest and most pampered get to pick which sweaters are de rigeur  and which shoes are appropriate for this weekend’s soirées. 

 

I can assure you they don’t care. I can assure they don’t think about why they despise Trump. I can assure you they don’t care about the slaughter on the streets and in the neighborhoods and even the boulevards of New York City. They’ll be in the Hamptons when the bad shit happens. Like as not in unisex salmon-colored cableknit cashmere sweaters atop white Egyptian cotton turtlenecks and whale pants.

 

The purpose of this post is to remind you that they are also rooted in their own youthful imprints. As a group they have accomplished no great things. They are the lucky parasites they mostly were from the start. They hate Trump for the very small reasons that always obsess untalented snobs. He doesn’t do the right things right. He has unseemly successes. He doesn’t pretend he wasn’t trying. He’s, well, gauche.

 

Which is worth sending the entire country to hell. No worse than firing the au-pair for putting the wrong forks on the table for the dinner party last week. Some people have some nerve. Not that we’re noticing. 

 

Thing is. It’s a bubble. An important one. Why you can’t buy this book on Kindle. It’s a grimoire, a kind of magic manual, even scripture. I can tell you about it because I was there, survived and prospered in it, documented it, and went on to new kinds of magic rooted to home and land and Detroit horsepower, bootchains, and real world contests not unlike what Trump has spent his life engaged in. 

 

I disengaged myself. As the rest of us should do. This is not a respectable code of life. It’s a phony, made more corrupt every day because actual merit has left the process. When I went to my school it cost $2,700 a year; now it costs $66,000. Same with all the other preppy schools. All that’s left is the children of the pampered class, the only ones left who can afford this level of affectation, however it’s accoutered itself in fashion terms now. What do they do? Not much. Why do they hate Trump? They don’t know. They just do. Trust me. I’ve talked to them. They’re just better. And they will never learn. They concentrate in New York and all the plush environs of their class, where they feel permanently safe. Our job is to make them feel less safe. New York? Drop dead.  

 

How should we envision the current crop, failed parents and stoned progeny? Try this glimpse of the Harvard Legacy Class of 2024:

 

But the Grotties and Choaties are still producing Muffy’s and Buffy’s  to

marry the Chips and Trips and Skips who will win at Nantucket softball.