Great Expectations

My note: I originally wrote the sketch of this piece back before I was getting my cataract surgery, but didn't use it because (I think) at my request, Leigh guested my spot and gave me time to get the cataracts out and heal up. Our latest amazing disruption is getting new computers which I believe to be if not the 3^rd, at least the 2^nd circle of hell. But we're back up and running, and here it is!

"It was the best of times; it was the worst of times."
— Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!—"
— William Wordsworth, The Prelude

Both of those quotes are based on the French Revolution, but that doesn't matter. Really. Youth always knows that this is their time, their time to grasp the rose, the pluck the flower from the nettle, to live with all the intensity of a thousand suns. That or they know that the whole world is against them, and nothing they can do will change it. It's later in life when people look back and go, well…

"My life has been mainly one of disappointments" - Almanzo Wilder (husband of Laura Ingalls Wilder) to his daughter Rose Wilder Lane in an interview taken in his old age in the 1930s.

Almanzo and Laura Ingalls Wilder

And here's Rose Wilder Lane reminiscing of her youth in Old Home Town, p 23, published in 1935:

"It was a hard, narrow, relentless life. It was not comfortable. Nothing was made easy for us. We did not like work and we were not supposed to like it; we were supposed to work, and we did. We did not like discipline, so we suffered until we disciplined ourselves. We saw many things and many opportunities that we ardently wanted and could not pay for, so we did not get them, or got them only after stupendous, heartbreaking effort and self-denial, for debt was much harder to bear than deprivations."

And it was a hard life: the Wilders were happily married, but only one child, Rose, survived.  Both Laura and Almanzo got diphtheria which gave him a stroke and permanently damaged his strength and agility.  They lost repeated crops and finally had to leave DeSmet, South Dakota, to make a new home in Missouri. It was a life of hard, hard, hard work, and certainly not much of a financial profit to show for it. But they enough to live on, and were together for over 50 years... And that was the ideal, back then.  

***

I used to teach my students not just the dates of kings and wars and literature, politics, philosophy, and inventions, but as much social history as I could cram in about how people actually lived. (See The $3,500 Dollar Shirt)

For example, the Middle Ages, when (among nobility and royalty) the oldest son was the heir (unless, like Talleyrand, they were disabled)*, the second son was put into the church (whether they had a vocation or not), and the rest were either put out as pages or squires or into the church as well. The eldest daughter got the best match in the parish, unless she was disfigured in some way, and then she went into the convent along with her sisters (again, no vocation required). Frankly, medieval monasteries were the equivalent of a larder or a form of birth control – where you put all the extra children - or all the children for whatever reason - and left them there, unless / until they were needed.

But of course the nobility and royalty were the smallest percentage of the population. Most were peasants – try about 80% – and then there were merchants – about 10-15%. And again, your future was locked in as much as if you lived in caste-system India.

A peasant's only future was in being a peasant - unless they showed remarkable talent as an artist (like Pieter Breugel the Elder, Botticelli, or Caravaggio) or in some craft, or ran off/were conscripted to join the army/navy for war (see or read The Return of Martin Guerre)**. Women would marry another peasant, or – if unmarriageable for some reason or other – would become a servant. An exception was Joan of Arc, who had visions, and became a soldier and a saint in the service of Charles VII of France, and got executed as a witch for her pains.  

Towns, as always, were where the freedom from inevitability beckoned: people would run there, hoping to become an apprentice (which required a payment to the master teacher) or a servant in a wealthy house (which didn't).  Many, of course, ended up as beggars.  

And there was always the wilderness - the great forests that still existed and could hide more than Robin Hood and his merry men.  

And that really was everyone's life until the Industrial Revolution (jobs for women as well as men in the factories!) and then the technological revolution of the early 1900's, when the Model T (1908) and the radio (1920) made travel and entertainment widely available and affordable.  And advertising sprang up, seemingly out of nowhere, in the mid 1800s... and voila! Suddenly not only did all these new things exist, but people had to have them.

We have been changed, entirely, from a world in which most people simply accepted their lot and lived it, taking their pleasures as they found them:  

Peasant Dance by Breugel

But now we live in a world of choices, hopes, dreams, possibilities, all supplied to us through TV, movies, advertising, endless freaking advertising... And abundance. We live in a country where we can go to the grocery store, drugstore, hardware store, etc. and get anything we want. Or if we don't want to go out, we can do it all from our computers, and put it on our credit cards or Venmo or whatever the latest is.  

Today, most of us have central heat, air conditioning, lighting, plumbing, smartphones, televisions, computers, cars, food (pizza, hotdogs and donuts at every gas station, tacos, burgers, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, fried chicken and biscuits and whatever the latest craze is on every block), endless freaking entertainment 24/7, etc. We have choices about where we're going to eat, drink, work, and live, and what we're going to do (or not) for our living. Granted, it costs money. But we also have a lot of ways to make money, or to borrow it, some legal, some not. We've got it made.

But we want more.  

And almost every political race for almost 60 years has pushed the idea that we're unhappy and discontented and we should be, from Nixon's "This time, vote like your whole world depended on it" to Reagan's "It's Morning Again in America" to, of course, "Make America Great Again." And it's worked.

Because we want more.  

The most comfortable time and place to live in all of history - and for some, the richest as well - and it seems that everyone's seriously discontented most of the time, and feels that they're not doing / being / having enough.  We want more.  Even the billionaires want more.  And more.  And more...

***

So, what does all of this have to do with crime?  Simple.  When there is never enough, and you always need more than you have or are, well, anything can happen, from alcohol /drug /media addiction, to robberies, embezzlement, fraud, ponzi schemes, endless scams to try and drown out the feeling of utter failure… And when nothing else works, there's always suicide, murder, mass murder, and if you have enough influence or power, war.  

And the wealthy are actually just as insecure as (and apparently more greedy than) the rest of us:  They hoard every penny; they don't pay their bills.  They buy enough politicians and voila! no taxes, no regulations, no inspections.  Your employees sue you?  Take them to court... forever.  The employees will drop out first.  Hang on to every last penny no matter what.  J. Paul Getty, at one time the richest man in the world, when his grandson was kidnapped and he received a ransom note and an ear, refused to pay - he said he "couldn't afford it."  And when asked, how much money would it take to make him feel secure, said, "More." 

Probably the earliest novel about envy, greed, and shattered hopes is Theodore Dreiser's "An American Tragedy".  Clyde Griffiths, born poor, working crap jobs, an having an affair with Roberta, another poor worker - and then he meets Sondra Finchley, the rich daughter of a factory owner, who likes him.  They date.  He wants to marry her; and he just might, except Roberta's pregnant.  What's a guy to do?  Murder...  (The 1951 film A Place in the Sun is probably the best adaptation of it: Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, and Shelley Winters...)

A less romantic take but just as classic (in its own way) is American Psycho:

Patrick Bateman: New card. What do you think?
Craig McDermott: Whoa-ho. Very nice. Look at that.
Patrick Bateman: Picked them up from the printer's yesterday.
David Van Patten: Good coloring.
Patrick Bateman: That's bone. And the lettering is something called Silian Rail.
David Van Patten: It's very cool, Bateman, but that's nothing. Look at this.
Timothy Bryce: That is really nice.
David Van Patten: Eggshell with Romalian type. What do you think?
Patrick Bateman: Nice.
Timothy Bryce: Jesus. That is really super. How'd a nitwit like you get so tasteful?
Patrick Bateman: [Thinking] I can't believe that Bryce prefers Van Patten's card to mine.
Timothy Bryce: But wait. You ain't seen nothin' yet. Raised lettering, pale nimbus. White.
Patrick Bateman: Impressive. Very nice.
David Van Patten: Hmm.
Patrick Bateman: Let's see Paul Allen's card.
Patrick Bateman: [Thinking] Look at that subtle off-white coloring. The tasteful thickness of it. Oh, my God. It even has a watermark.
Luis Carruthers: Is something wrong, Patrick? You're sweating. (IMDB)

And then he's off to kill somebody… Anybody.  

Great expectations are very dangerous.

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*Talleyrand. The eldest son of his house, he was put out to nurse in the countryside for his first few years (normal for the time; following the king was a full-time job) where he was permanently lamed in an accident. His parents then made his younger brother the heir, and put Talleyrand boy into the Church, where he became the most dissolute, loose-living, atheistic Catholic Bishop since the Borgia pope. He was also one of the few noblemen who survived the French Revolution AND the Directoire AND Napoleon AND the Bourbon Restoration… Tough and wily.  

**The Return of Martin Guerre - One of Gerard Depardieu's best roles.

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