kimberlysteele | Not Just The Rich Men North of Richmond

Anyone who is not living on a desert island has likely heard of Anthony Oliver, the viral singer-songwriter whose song, Rich Men North of Richmond, implicates a certain set of elites in Washington DC who allegedly ruin the country with their bad decisions. What if I told you those politicians had a fairly inconsequential part in creating the mess that inspired Rich Men North of Richmond? Politicians are despotic... trust me, I know, I live in Illinois and when a member of my Speakeasy group derided others for voting in the miserable crew we have at the moment, I asked him, "Have you met Illinois?" Elections here do not matter. I have personally witnessed two election officials brazenly looking at my completed ballot in disgust and I would not have been shocked if every ballot they disagreed with ended up tossed in a dumpster at the end of the night. It is an open secret that Illinois is a banana republic with its own renditions of Charles II at the helm. The only way of deposing the Illinois monarchy is via guillotine, and though I am sure that can be arranged, the common folk are not quite ready to go full Jacobin at this time.

As fun and easy as it is to scapegoat politicians for their copious bad decisions and dictates, the meat of the problem lies right here at home. When I was a child in the 1970s and early 80s, I knew my neighbors so well that they were a stone's throw away from acting as godparents. Our tight-knit family reliably spent holidays at each other's houses. The elementary school self-published a mimeographed book of the names, addresses, and phone numbers of every student and teacher and gave copies to everyone in the school. Many of the families in town were wealthy, but the most ostentatious displays of wealth were limited to having a small in-ground pool and having a vacation home in either Florida or Wisconsin. Fast forward forty years and nearly every neighbor I grew up with has either moved far away or has atomized to distant corners of the country and globe. In my own case, I strongly considered running off to a faraway land where it would not be necessary to own a car. Nobody would dream of publishing the private phone numbers of little kids in a paper book. Displays of wealth have metastasized: there is hardly a McMansion out there without an in-ground pool. In northern Illinois, such a pool can only be used a quarter of the year at best. In all other seasons, it must be drained, covered, and cleaned by a small crew of typically brown men who may or may not be here legally.

SIMRES: Suckas Idolizing Mediocre Real Estate

The trouble with Rich Men North of Richmond is that it isn't just them. I cannot afford to live anywhere near the neighborhood where I grew up. The area is beset with suburbanites trying to outdo each other. In the 80s, the upper middle class added to their existing homes, morphing modest three bedrooms into four, expanding kitchens and bathrooms, and adding garages. In the 90s, McMansions entered the scene, and now the remodeled four bedroom seemed modest in comparison. In the 2000s, the home equity craze had people using their homes as piggy banks, desperate to climb the property ladder. This trend was stalled by the crash of 2008 but was back and rolling by the mid-2010s. Covidmania blew the housing prices sky-high, and though the exodus from big cities tamped down the bubble by a modest amount, a 776 square foot one-bedroom, one-bathroom high rise apartment in San Francisco, the Poop Capital of the World, costs $2720 per month. As long as someone is willing to pay it, someone else will charge it.

The problems Anthony Oliver sings about in Rich Men North of Richmond -- too many hours for bulls**t pay, people on the street going hungry while obese wokesters get fat on welfare, and runaway inflation -- are actually the logical results of the decisions average people make and continue to make. The upper middle class is at fault. I have a relative who moved into an ugly McMansion in an exclusive neighborhood. When asked why she chose to have her husband purchased the place when they had a very nice, expanded, remodeled home to begin with, she said, "Because I can". My parents, who used their financial prosperity to buy a vacation home in the 1980s, are at fault. Some kids I grew up with had hoarder parents who owned no less than five storage units stuffed to the gills with accumulated junk. They are at fault. I am at fault and so are you.

The Karma of Unearned Wealth

The reason why I try very hard not to do unearned wealth anymore is because someone has to earn it. I do not want the karma of unearned wealth to hit me in this and future lives, so I try to avoid it. When my parents decided to take their economic windfalls of the 1980s and buy a vacation home, it was a decision that rippled all around them. Suddenly, it wasn't enough just to rent a sketchy cottage on a lakeshore; it became de rigueur to own a place where you could go at almost any time. When one person puts an addition on their home or takes a wrecking ball to a perfectly useable place in order to erect a much larger, newer building in its entirety, the property values and taxes are raised across the board. A neighborhood that was once populated by people who made just enough to live in a smaller home becomes the domain of doctors, lawyers, and insurance CEOS. Music teachers and security guards have to go elsewhere. Towns begin competing for wealth in a similar race. Maybe you've heard of a town where I used to live and work called Naperville. Naperville is an extremely prosperous town that put McMansions on the map back in the day. The downtown is the cold-weather version of Dubai. Downers Grove, the town where I grew up, wants to be Naperville, yet has never been able to attract the huge corporate money that has enabled Naperville to pave its streets in silver and gold. Downers Grove's stupid city council avoided putting Napervillian infrastructure in high-traffic areas for fifty years and now has screwed itself out of Naperville creme de la creme status because of it. Yet if you walk down any Downers Grove street, you can sense the longing and jealousy. In both Naperville and Downers Grove, I have often spotted this sign:

This sign irritates me to no end. Though it is put up by well-meaning people, it is pure, empty virtue signaling. I have never seen the sign in the lower middle class neighborhood where I live. Not once.

I could not help but make my own version to get even:

There is an old saying "If you cannot beat them, join them" that is essentially what I tried to do when I was straight out of college. I grew up salary class and though I should have known better, I went through a phase where I tried to become salary class. Now that I have the benefit of hindsight, I realize that the salary class is not for me and I cannot join them without completely selling out. I would honestly rather die as a kamikaze than become more grist for the salary class mill, so with this bargain I consign myself to great and mournful losses.

None if By Plane

I won't speak for anyone else, however, in my desire to be the change, I may never travel by plane again. I am not afraid of flying. The problem with flying is that it has become a common leisure activity. I knew someone who actually flew to China from the US and only stayed there for a few hours. Basically this person saw a Chinese airport firsthand and then turned around and flew back. I knew two other Americans who visited Antarctica. A trip to Antarctica involves flying to South America and either crossing the Drake Passage via ship or another flight. Just as family trips to Florida in the 80s morphed into family trips to Prague and Budapest in the 2010s, vacationing in St. Barts is no longer enough. You've got to go to ANTARCTICA now to get those bragging rights. You need to rack up eighteen hours (at least) in order to get there. The amount of fossil fuel resources squandered in order to indulge such a vacation is absolutely staggering. Anyone who goes to Antarctica for pleasure is the opposite of an environmentalist, even if they are fruit-only vegans for the duration of their lives who avoid having biological children and driving a car.

I will not contribute to the gentrification of my lower middle class neighborhood any more than I already have. My husband and I have improved our house and garden to the best of our ability and within the limits of our modest finances. That's where it ends. Even if I end up somehow earning a far larger income than I am working with right now, I am not going to betray the only neighborhood where I could afford a house a decade ago by turning around and starting a property ladder race. I will not go out and buy a McMansion "because I can". If I have a windfall, I will put it into the creation of a private physical library, a music school, or a brick and mortar sheet music store.

The salary class and their handlers fear people who cannot be bought. The rich men north of Richmond were bought off long ago, though at this point, any compromising videos of them with "miners" can be passed off as AI deepfakes. The poor girl who would sell her body and soul to become an influencer and the pampered suburban boy who becomes far more pampered with the help of sponsorship cheddar are very much part of the problem. Anyone who can be bought is part of the problem, and the only solution to my mind is to avoid the dealers.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

k_a_nitz

That word kindness was killed for me by Jacinda Ardern's "Be kind", which inspired me to get a T-shirt printed with the slogan "Be kind (of)". Though it wasn't as terrible as her "They are us", which is also execrable grammar.

From:

mr_nobody1967

Now that I have the benefit of hindsight, I realize that the salary class is not for me and I cannot join them without completely selling out.

After reading Barbara Ehrenreich's Bait And Switch (not to mention hearing about other people's experiences), I am inclined to think that most if not all bridges leading to the world of the well-to-do salaried class have been dynamited by the early two-thousand-aughts at the very latest.

From: (Anonymous)

The saddest part of this is that it's not a new problem. This was written about 18-20 centuries ago:

And he said unto them, Take heed, and beware of covetousness: for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth. And he spake a parable unto them, saying, The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully: And he thought within himself, saying, What shall I do, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits? And he said, This will I do: I will pull down my barns, and build greater; and there will I bestow all my fruits and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry. But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided? So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.

From:

methylethyl

May I steal your corrected version of the "in this house" sign? Pretty Please?

From:

methylethyl

The real estate game... yeah. Sigh. Still trying to save up a downpayment for a house. Still getting outpaced by the overinflated real estate market, and rising interest rates. We're 40. Not gonna be taking out a 30-year mortgage. So the rule is, if we're gonna buy it, we have to be able to pay it off in 15 years or less, on our *current* income, and still have enough room in the budget to replace the roof once... not counting on the magic of projected future raises that may not actually happen, because lately what inflation does is raises the cost of basic necessities like food way faster than employers get around to "cost of living" increases.

We're treading water and not getting anywhere.

I realize that a crash in the real estate market will torch a lot of people's retirement plans, but since we are never gonna be able to retire anyway... I am so ready to light that match. Real estate as an investment is oppressive to everybody who falls in the space between those rich enough to so invest, and those living in tents and RVs.

I hate to say "there oughtta be a law".

No, there oughtta be guardrails in place that prevent inflation. The goal of the Fed shouldn't be to inflate the money so that the govt. can stealth-default on its ridiculous debts. Its goal should be to maximize stability for the benefit of regular non-investor-class people-- keep the dollar at roughly the same value over the long haul. It is inflation that creates investment bubbles, because with declining currency value, the only way to hang onto wealth you've got, is to spend it before you even have it (i.e. take out a huge loan). A no-inflation economy is one that works *for* people who save money-- i.e. regular honest thrifty folks who aren't trying to get something for nothing-- and against profligate borrowers.

From:

Not Just The Rich Men North of Richmond

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags