The Beauty of the System
…Still, it’s not easy being an upscale suburban white middle class American. There is a certain amount of guilt involved. (Cut to forty million black Americans laughing hysterically.) Waking up to suburban life’s true global cost is like finding out that you have a hundred slaves in some unseen place on the other side of the world making your clothing, working in your mines and harvesting your Gevalia coffee. It’s more than a conundrum. It’s a moral confrontation with real justice and values. Jefferson had the same conflict about his slave ownership. He never came to grips with it either. Old Tom never freed that piece of side action, Sally Hemmings. Nor are we about to demand freedom for the sweatshop slaves who turn endangered nyatoh rainforest trees into Sears ‘classic and timeless patio furniture.’ Who is gonna turn down an Everyday Martha Stewart Stockbridge 5-Piece Bistro set for a hundred and fifty bucks? ‘Fuck the eco-kooks, what they need is a good bath and a character-building hitch in the Marines, preferably in Iraq.’ Of course we never say such things. We never even think them. We don’t think at all when the in-laws are coming in from the West Coast and we need that patio set for entertaining. The renunciation of earthly goods is no easy thing if your father-in-law fought his way across Italy in the Big War, then came home to work 70 hours a week building up a business so you could ‘have it better than we had it,’ and is damned proud of the way his kids and grandkids are flourishing in what he considers a consumer paradise of goods and opportunities. What’s to renounce? Life is good here in Brambleton. ‘Hell, why don’t you kids get a Hummer? You have the children’s safety to think of, you know.’ ‘Yes dad, we thought about a Hummer, but we’re holding off for GM’s new Huey commuter model helicopter gunship.’
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