This is the Portofino Shopping Center, located in a wealthy suburb of Houston, Texas and apparently inspired by Venetian architecture. A couple weeks ago, it was the only PetSmart with my cat’s food in stock, so I went to pick up an order.
My father, driving, conducted a barely private anxious meltdown about how, logistically, to pay for the pizza my mother had ordered by phone for pick-up (but how will we prove we ordered if she’s not with us), while I had a parallel silent fit in the passenger’s seat about how much I loathe these buildings and whether that made me an irredeemable elitist monster imported back from California™ and Europe™ and the East Coast™ and how unfair it was that an inanimate object could accuse me of being unkind.
Then I remembered how corruptible class shorthands often are. Co-opted markers of underdog class belonging rely on social awkwardness and goodwill to complete the obfuscating inference/lie. There’s frequently the conflation of education and wealth, too, adding a special anti-intellectual umami to things. Examples that come to mind:
I really believed Olive Garden was fancy as a kid! having become an easy social media shorthand for a poor/middle-class upbringing, as though rich children couldn’t misperceive the world just on account of being children (please see end for a note on Natalia Ginzburg’s The Little Virtues);
intentionally using folksy language to make a that’s-elitist! shield available when the fraudulence is identified, à la Josh Hawley's “irregardless”;
the militarization of luxury consumer trucks for “utility”/ego at the expense of other road users and the public good.
It gives us stuff like this, from the hellbound:
The subversion is so cynical it hurts. I do not mock enthusiasm. I think of photos of myself as a child, before I spoke English, with things and at places unremarkable but for that family and I were together in frame, happy. They are precious to me.
But the nouveau riche are not poor, even if they were once, and yet the specters of assumed meritocracy and striving and deservedness swoop about, insisting that it’s bullying, in fact, to deem a badly conceived and executed Epcot pavilion hilariously tasteless. I was going to write more about this, but I can’t think of a way to do so that wouldn’t be as annoying and trite and pointless and BORING as what I’m complaining about, so I leave you with a couple more images of this distressing Wonder of the Suburban World in all its pathetically gaudy, failed-camp American horror.
Also thinking about
Natalia Ginzburg’s The Little Virtues. It’s a gorgeous, warm collection I’ve been describing as listening to someone very, very wise. The titular essay presents very astute observations about how to rear children to be aware of what money can do without instilling stinginess and false victimhood (e.g., in the case of wealthy parents who mean to “teach” frugality by withholding frivolous little pleasures and instead only sow resentment and jealousy and self-pity in the child who now begrudges factually poorer peers). I loved this book very much.
Greenspoint Mall, now shuttered and abandoned, where I spent so much time as a child. Particularly its playground and CiCi’s.
And yes, how special Olive Garden is to my family — and how fraudulent it would be to act as though there isn’t a gulf of circumstances and opportunity between who I was as a child and who my CV says I am now. It was a significant endeavor when my parents started being able to send me to piano lessons — in the back of an auto repair shop at first, taught by the definition of Some Viet Guy who was not much older than I currently am — but I still got to take them (and frankly, I’m quite good). Why would I pretend otherwise? Thinking about people, especially students at prestigious institutions, who conveniently elide these changes in their own lives, relying on the aforementioned “conflation of education and wealth” as a retort, a defense. There’s a dishonest way to use any honest point!