Eat the Rich; But First, Snack on Service Workers

This, from Crazy Jesus Dolphin Lady, has got to be one of the strangest complaints about economic inequality I’ve ever read. After wondering what on God’s green earth billionaires actually do for a living, and after vaguely mourning that the “gap between rich and poor is great,” Noonan opens up about what she perceives to be one of great social corrosives begotten by the “new Gilded Age”:

There are good things and bad in the Gilded Age, pluses and minuses. I write here of a minus. It has to do with our manners, the ones we show each other on the street. I think riches, or the pursuit of riches, has made us ruder. You’d think broad comfort would assuage certain hungers. It has not. It has sharpened them.

Fabulous. In an era of “broad comfort” — when actual hunger and food insecurity has increased over the past decade — Noonan thinks we’ve all become a bunch of Goops. This is batshit. Regardless, her real annoyance here is not the hyper-rich — whose wealth she finds hopelessly incomprehensible — but the service workers who won’t keep their proper distance. In a sequence best described as the literary lovechild of James Lileks and Ann Althouse, Noonan deciphers the miseries of the age:

Here’s a moment in the pushiness of the Gilded Age. I walk into a shop on Madison Avenue daydreaming, trying to remember what it was I thought last week I should pick up, what was it . . .

“Hi! Let me help you find what you’re looking for!” She is a saleswoman, cracking gum with intensity, about 25 years old, and she has made a beeline to her mark. That would be me.

. . . What they are forcing you to do is engage. If you engage–“Um, thanks”–you have a relationship. If you have a relationship, it’s easier for them to turn you upside down and shake the coins from your pockets.

. . . There are strategies. You can do the full Garbo: “Leave me alone.” But they’ll think you’re a shoplifter and watch you. Or the strong lady with boundaries: “Thank you, if I need help I’ll ask.” But your reverie is broken. Or the acquiescent person: “Take me under your leadership, oh aggressively friendly salesperson.” But this is bowing to the pushiness of the Gilded Age.

No. “Bowing to the pushiness of the Gilded Age” means proposing tax cuts that would extend more than $11 billion in tax savings to the heirs of the Mars candy company while knocking $420 million from a program that provides heating assistance to the poor. Pushy, reverie-smashing service workers, I would submit, offer us no testimony whatsoever to the virtues or vices of the “new Gilded Age.” Undeterred, Noonan continues to scold the help throughout the rest of the column — berating sidewalk petitioners here, griping about restaurant servers there — while trying to maintain her status (perceived by Peggy Noonan alone) as a plain old middle-class girl from North Jersey.

Perhaps after gnawing her arm from beneath the president, Noonan’s wound has gone septic; perhaps when she wakes up each day, her head is simply filled with calliope music that must be transliterated into the semblance of political commentary. I really don’t know.

. . . Tom Hilton takes a few swings at the Dolphin Lady as well:

She never notices that the very rich don’t give a shit about the other 99.9% of the world? Or that across the economic spectrum, in ways minor and major, people have largely abandoned any notion of the public good? Or that in doing so, people are responding to a quarter century of indoctrination by Peggy’s ideological compatriots, beginning with her former boss? That this is a world she helped to create?