COMM 337: Judith Warner, combining the personal and political / READ MONDAY

Since the first generation of women's lib, feminist writers have made a point of combining the personal and the political. It operates on several levels. One has to do with airing women's issues in the political arena. Another is a reaction to the perceived tendency of male writers to dwell on subcommittees, caucuses and public policy issues while women write more easily about people and values. It's a stereotype, but like most stereotypes, it has just enough truth to it to be worth considering.

One writer who combines the personal and the political today is Judith Warner, a freelancer who writes the blog "Domestic Disturbances" for The New York Times along with pieces for other markets on cultural and political issues. It's ostensibly about parenting, but she's been writing lately about subjects ranging from the Nov. 4 election to migranes, R.E.O. Speedwagon and the stock market crash. But with an eye for detail and a sensibility that sets her apart from most financial and political writers. She gets kind of East Coast-y and New York City-ish sometimes, but then she writes for a paper in New York.

Today's column takes off on Sarah Palin, of whom Warner says,

She speaks no better — and no worse — than many of her crowd-pleasing male peers, dropping her g’s, banishing “who” in favor of “that,” issuing verbal blunders that linger just long enough to make their mark in the public mind before they’re winked away in staged apologies.

Music to my ears, because my generation preserves the distinction that you use "who" for people and "that" for inanimate objects, even if I am getting to the point I've heard quite enough about Palin to last me for a while.

Another column, one I think shows Warner at the top of her form, is headlined "Waiting for Schadenfreude" and gives her take on the financial crisis. She begins:

A couple of years ago, at the height of the boom, a friend in New York publishing described to me the indignities of being a five-figure employee commuting daily from suburban New Jersey on trains packed with traders, stock brokers and hedge-fund types.

“These were the guys who, in college, I used to step over on Sunday mornings when they were lying in a pool of their own vomit,” he said. “And now they’re earning millions and millions – in bonuses alone.”

The image, as you might imagine, stuck in my mind. For it summed up so well a certain kind of resentment and sense of injustice that a particular class of non-monied professionals in the New York area came to feel sometime in the late 1990s.

The feeling of injustice wasn’t just about money, though it was partly about being more than solidly middle class and still struggling to pay the bills, as New York writer Vince Passaro captured so well in his “Reflections on the Art of Going Broke” (“Who’ll Stop the Drain?”) in Harper’s in 1998.

It was, rather, about a sense that the wrong people had inherited the earth.

They had taken over everything. Their salaries (and bonuses in particular) had pushed real estate costs and living expenses sky-high. Their values had permeated every aspect of life. And their choices seemed to have become the only acceptable — even viable — ones possible.

I haven't read the article she mentioned, and I don't take a train to work. But I know what it feels like to opt for a low-paying career. Warner continues:

Many of us who’d proudly decided, in our twenties, to pursue edifying or creative, or “helping” professions, woke up to realize, once we had families, that we’d perhaps been irresponsible. We couldn’t save for college. We could barely save for retirement. If we set up a “family-friendly” lifestyle, we threw our financial futures down the drain.

So, like just about everyone, we worked hard and treaded water, but felt we were entitled to do better than that. And if we lived in the New York area, or another similarly wealthy area where the spoils of the new Gilded Age were constantly thrust in our faces, we felt, like my friend on the train, a little something more: we knew that we were losers.

Then, hardly even a month ago, came the crash. Warner said she was surprised she didn't feel vindicated.

... those of us who felt, well, like losers, are feeling like even bigger losers, as we shove our unopened 401K or (if we’re double-loser freelancers) SEP-IRA statements into bottom desk drawers and wait for a cathartic burst of schadenfreude that simply refuses to come.

Schadenfreude is impossible because the fat cats — the ones who bent the rules, the ones who pushed the envelopes, the ones who paid lower taxes because capital gains were most of their income, the ones who opposed regulations on the banking and mortgage industries — are taking us down with them.

In the end, she gets back to her friend who commuted into the city with all the stockbrokers from Jersey:

I called my friend in publishing yesterday to ask him how things were going on the train.

“There’s a lot of rueful chuckling. There’s a lot of talk about riding this out, about maintaining,” is all he had to say.

It was 23 years ago that Tom Wolfe introduced us to the Masters of the Universe. They were curiosities then — remote, very rich, and decidedly not like you and me. But now, the world of Wall Street has become our world; there is no outside to it, there is no other option than to pay and play. Our fortunes rise and fall together to a degree like never before, and our values are enmeshed like never before. The language of Wall Street — of cost-cutting and efficiency, self-interest, using each situation to maximize profit, is the language of everyday life and social interaction.

We’re all losers now. There’s no pleasure to it.

Let's read some more of Warner (click on her standing head "Domestic Disturbances" to get a directory). But when you get to the bottom of "Waiting for Schadenfreude," read some of the comments. They're civil, they're literate. At least one of them (from a blogger in San Francisco) may be kind of self-promotional, but it's civil and literate, too.