Chris Arnade, a bankster overcome by wealthguilt, spent three years visiting poverty pockets and writing a book about those who have less in the United States today. He talked to Peter Mommsen of Plough magazine about his experience and his book, here.
Did you read it yet? Please. Right-click to open it in a separate tab. This web site will wait while you...begin to form the habit of abusing your browsers the way I do...oh, well...Anyway, before reading this post you'll want to read what it's a reaction to.
Now, some insights into the transition from writer-in-residence at a cafe, to writer-taking-up-space in McDonald's, to writer-with-private-wi-fi...
First let me say that, due to two different exceptional circumstances, at this particular moment I think the private wi-fi is better. If the person who offered to sponsor it for a year doesn't want to renew the sponsorship, I'd be praying that someone elee would sponsor it for next year. But that's due to two unusual circumstances. Generally I think writing from the cafe was better.
What are the unusual circumstances, someone might ask. One: I'm being personally harassed, one might say terrorized, one might even say tortured, by a psychopath. I've received threats that I take seriously enough to believe it's a good idea for this character never to know whether I'm in my house, near my house, away from the house, awake or asleep, watching or not. Having the Internet connection in the neighborhood, I believe, is also useful. Having an Internet-based security system with multiple cameras would be better, and if I'd had that and a drone I believe he'd be in an institution today.
The other one is less unusual. The cafe changed hands. The couple who built it up to the point where it could support a writer reached retirement age; their children, who had worked in the cafe, didn't want to keep it up. New peoiple bought it. So now they're having to build it up all over again and I think it's best to give them a year or two before even asking them to think about having a writer-in-residence.
Now, here's the situation as I see it. Arnade is right about the utterly ridiculous, elitist, unnecessary, bigoted, un-American division that still persists in the way too many of us think. Instead of being ancestry snobs or overt money snobs, our ideal of meritocracy has made us education snobs. In theory that rewards individual choice; in practice, snobbery about ancestry and money has a way of sneaking back in, because education is not quite equally available to all. So although it's certainly possible for single women, for Black people, for people who speak English as a second language, or for people from poor families, to get the education and get into the "front row" in our society, it's not typical. We have a woman who identifies as Black for a Vice-President. Nobody likes or trusts her, but hey, she got there. A woman who doesn't have to tell us she's Black may not be far behind. But that's not to say that the average ghetto girl is being prepared to qualify for even a clerical job in city government, much less to be Vice-President of the United States.
So there are all these sneaky little things that don't seem directly related with money or ancestry or education, and they change from generation to generation, but the careful observer notices a strong correlation.
Your given name may be one of them. The name Bilqisha, or Qisha, Kesha, Kecia or however else people spell it, was brought into this country by diplomats. Bilqisha or Bilqis is the name Arab oral history gives to the Queen of Sheba, Qisha is a short form, like Moody for Mahmood. If your parents are Arabs and you answer to the name of Qisha you might be on that "front row" of people who had some education, some career choices, and also their parents had average or above-average incomes. If the language spoken in your home when you were growing up was English and your name is Kesha, and you went to college, you were probably the first one in your family who went to college.
Here's the deal, though. A lot of Americans think snobbery is both detestable and ridiculous, enough that, as soon as these correlations are recognized and called out, they start to break down.
My generation weren't called Kesha. A lot of us were called Kathy. Similar fashion trends apply to other trendy names, Carol, Susan, Debby, Sherry, but they really showed up in the case of Kathy because there were so many traditional versions of that name. In the 1950s the "front row" rule was to put Catherine on the birth certificate and call the girl Cathy--the C spelling was higher-status than the K spelling. In the 1960s the ethnic versions like Kathleen and Kathryn were trendier, and little girls were still called Kathy--the C spelling had come to look oldfashioned, and the K spelling was higher-status. (Or Karen, which was supposed to be an alternate reference to the same patron saint. Masses of freshman-class baby-boomers were Karen. I went all the way through school with four Karens.) In the 1970s it was acceptable, though parents were teased about doing it, to put Kathi or Debbi or Jenni or Jessi on the birth certificate. In the 1980s all the little girls called Cathy were agreeing that that name was so generic they might as well not have had given names, and trying to "upgrade" it to Kate. In the 1990s the trend was to put Caitlyn on the birth certificate and call the girl Kate. Now Kay or Kayla still sound thinkable, but nobody would want to burden a little girl with the name Caitlyn. People kept consciously rejecting whichever version had come to be seen as appealing to social climbers.
So in the act of recognizing that, if the parents aren't still close to an Arab or North African country, the name Kesha has a "back row" image, I may be changing that. In the act of calling out attitudes toward McDonald's as a major status indicator, Arnade may be making it less of one. That's all to the good--but some people do want to be snobs, and when we break down one status indicator, another one is likely to take its place.
Although the image of the writer who hangs out in a cafe, nursing a cheap drink along for hours, is certainly not an image of wealth, it's "front row," because writers are educated. Cafes are found in Paris, Milan, Madrid, cities with super-posh universities where super-achievers go as exchange students or teachers. The early twentieth century's best known writers all at least seemed to want to spend some time in Paris hanging out together in cafes.
So there's still a certain aura of status, for both the writer and the cafe, associated with writing in a cafe. You can be poor, in terms of cash flow. That's actually part of the cafe writer's image. Rich successful writers don't hang out in cafes any more. While writing in a cafe you can still be "struggling." You can be adorably scruffy, with shaggy hair (male or female), an incomplete beard (male), even toddlers in tow (female) if they're well-behaved. You can have your own style, which can go all the way to period costume (I've read of a local character, not in my locality, who wore completely accurate Victorian outfits), or punk, or jeans as a uniform, or painfully clean but visibly vintage business-casual. A lot of people who patronize cafes like to feed the writer; you walk in to work and they tell you someone's already paid for your drink. People would bring in yarn or books and leave them under the counter for me. Of course, if you ever achieve a bestseller, you're supposed to pay it all back, treat everyone in town to drinks or meals, but people realize they may not live to see the day. A cafe writer is seen as having less, and can be patronized and put down for that reason, but a cafe writer is still completely in the "front row."
I can tell you that this cafe writer had the goal of moving out of the cafe into my own store where I could display my own merchandise while writing. The cafe was a great place to establish my image as diligent and educated and poor. Nobody wants to stay poor! Let some other writer or artist be adorably scruffy and poor! But it was a very pleasant, clean, fragrant, wholesome, totally "front row" place to mingle with people at the very front of the front row.
And yes, the correlation was observable. It's been observed for some time that while an avowed racist once claimed that my town was "pure Anglo-Saxon," actually most of our ancestors were Irish, Scotch, German, Cherokee, but not English. Anglo-Saxon ancestors are a minority. I have a few, on Mother's side. Aristocrats whose history is found in the history books. Horrid people. From their point of view, of course, the ones who were sent to America were the worst of the lot. Well, the Roberts Family Bakery got its name from Mr. Roberts, who came from England. They served scones. Everyone with an English or an aristocratic Scottish ancestor mingled there. Funnily enough, that group of people all have the "good" conformation that's associated with a long healthy life, worldwide. And either ancestral land, or ancestral money, or both. And at least some members of each family went to a reasonably big-name university.
Of course we still identify as hillbillies, farmers, working people--we like to think it's purely personal choices that set us off from other hillbilly farmers and working people. "Classy" was a word older people used, no longer a "front row" word, sort of embarrassing. The blogger known as Ozarque tried to revive "gentry." Well, she was from Arkansas. This is Virginia. I recognize some people as gentlemen or -women and others as, well, not. The oral tradition, and even the literature of our English-speaking ancestors, has decorated the old feudal idea of a gentleman as a descendant of a family that has had a certain amount of property for a certain amount of time, with a lot of additional ideas about how he ought to behave. Of course it's possible to live by those ideals if your family had no property or education at all, but it's unusual.
At least one person I met at the cafe positively revelled--still does revel--in that sense of being part of an elite group. To me that's horrible. You can be privileged, you can be an elite group, you can't help that any more than you can help your race or sex, but deliberately being racist, sexist, or elitist is just not something I thinka Christian can do. People would talk about the state and prospects of our peculiar little town. I don't want to say that this person "would always say" anything, because person would not get up on a metaphorical soapbox and rant about it, but when encouraged to express opinions this person would say things like, "I want it to be upscale. I want things that attract an upscale crowd. A gift shop, not a T-shirt shop. A flower shop, not a consignment store. I want to bring in people who don't mind paying a little more, raising property values a little, so we can raise taxes and do more for people." I might disagree politely, or I might say nothing, and I'd be thinking "There ought to be a way to keep this person from having a vote!" To me one of the best things about my little town is that, despite having places that attract educated people from the "front row," it has no visible stratification. I think there's less room for elitist bigotry to develop when the big house sits next to a trailer house and the chic little boutique is across the street from the Dollar Store.
Well, anyway, that was the cafe, while it was open. Sometimes people who didn't hang out at the cafe seem to want to believe that some sort of quarrel took place. What actually happened was the coronavirus panic. Now Mrs. Roberts was--is, in retirement--a stalwart Carson Republican, which is my favorite kind of R's if people are going to compromise themselves with R or D loyalty. We had similar feelings about the coronavirus when we were only reading about it. "Just another silly panic. If the virus does get here, it'll be just another strain of flu." Which it was.
State government people came into the cafe in April. "You can have only half the number of people in the building, at one time, as it's set up to accommodate. You can't have self-service coffee and water dispensers for everyone to use. Everyone who works here must wear a mask."
"You're going to have to stop working here every day," someone said to me, dripping Schadenfreude.
"No such," said Mrs. Roberts. "You come in as usual. Show no fear! We're going to wear masks. I've ordered some cute ones. They come by the half-dozen, so you," she turned to me, "will match the rest of us. I don't think anyone will actually be counting how many people are in the building."
"Well, if a lot of people come in for lunch I can always go to the post office. I ought to do that more often anyway," I said.
State government people came back in May. "You can't have people sitting down at tables. You have outdoor tables. Use those."
"You can work at one of the tables on the sidewalk," said Mrs. Roberts, but in fact I couldn't, because there was nowhere to plug in my laptop. There were tables around the back of the building. There I could plug in my laptop, but the sun glared on the screen, and it wasn't safe to count on days without rain. So for a while I worked in a storage room in the basement. There I got a lot of work done, but the basement also contained an apartment in which a Roberts boy about the age of my older Nephews was living. "He works nights and sleeps all day anyway," but of course day sleepers don't really sleep all day. I didn't think it was fair to a young working man to get up and stumble to the bathroom and find someone else's aunt in it, and worse than that, every time either of us connected to the Internet the other's connection was lost. Several work days had been spoiled before my coronavirus check came through and I laid down the payment for a private, temporary Internet connection.
Well, as regular readers remember, that didn't work, either, for very long. I was getting back into a working routine when the paid connection stopped connecting. Internet service became sketchy even in town and nonexistent for private connections in rural parts of the county, no matter how much who was paying. I checked by trying to go online from a half-dozen different friends' houses--using their connections, or their unsuspecting neighbors'--because I wondered whether my connection, specifically, was being sabotaged by Bayer goons. But no. It was county-wide. People paid for Internet connections but they didn't have them. There were stores in town to which I could walk, set up the laptop outside, and either plug it in to an outlet as needed or move on when the battery ran down, but their signals were unreliable too. I did not actually spend most of the days of 2021 trying to connect to the Internet, but when I think of using the Internet in 2021, it seems as if I spent the whole year watching the status bar indicate "Trying to connect...connection is poor...trying to reconnect...connected...disconnected...battery dead!" for half an hour while someone was waiting for an reply to an e-mail...
So one day I asked The Grouch if he was getting any use of his paid Internet connection, and he said, "The best connection in town is at McDonald's." It was still illegal to sit down at a table inside McDonald's. I sat at one outside the building a few times that summer, and then, finally, it was legal to sit down inside again. I asked the managers if they wanted a writer-in-residence. They did. "Tell everybody we're open!"
I did. It was a very different experience.
It's not that the crowd at McDonald's was so much "lower-class" than the crowd at the cafe. Actually, quite a lot of the same people went into both places for different meals. Lawyers and litigants would go to the cafe because it was close to the courthouse, but for people who were in town to shop or work at stores, McDonald's might have been closer to where they were. I met teachers and school friends, business owners and land owners, in McDonald's too. Some of them paid for my drinks there, too, and more than once someone bought me a meal that, well, at least the cats would eat. Not that I wanted the cats to eat a lot of McDonald's meals either.
And it's not that I really minded...at the cafe, anyone who sat at the table I usually used was probably another laptop user, but some people are messy eaters. McDonald's attractd more people than the cafe did. Sometimes I wouldn't want to wait for someone else to clean up after a messy eater in the cafe, either--but it wasn't just that that occurred once or twice a in a year of daily work at the cafe, and about every other day at McDonald's. I'd walk in, and before taking the laptop out of its carrying case I'd check for sticky residues on the table and on the seat. If sticky residues were present, I' didn't really mind cleaning them off. But I did think that, in view of the number of napkins anyone in a hurry to use a table was likely to need to make the table fit for use, McDonald's could have been less miserly with the napkins, especially considering the cheap napkins they used. They were miserly with the salt, too.
There are just so many little ways McDonald's is--intentionally--not as nice a place as almost any privately owned, or even smaller-chain, restaurant or cafe. The color scheme was specifically chosen to be "eat-and-run orange." Most people don't enjoy sitting in a room that has a lot of orange in its decor--subconsciously they feel that it might be on fire--so McDonald's is decorated in orange. Piped-in music, once that was working again--the genre of music theoretically reflects what local audiences listen to, but the music is abrasive. The "friendly" staff seem to be systematically trained to act like the perfect stereotype of obnoxious pushy pests no introvert could possibly want as friends I often read that some introverts like extroverts, but surely they mean the mellow Oprah Winfrey or Ronald Reagan kind, not the bare-all-their-teeth-as-close-as-possible-to-your-face-and-SHRIEK kind.
McDonald's does not train its employees to show respect to the customers. I don't think I ever approached the counter without thinking that someone really ought to take the whelkp working behind it by the scruff of the neck and shout at it: "Now hear this, Spoilt Brat. Where is your paycheck coming from? Thank the lady or gentleman who is paying your salary. Bow your head! Modulate your voice! Show respect! For Heaven's sake, child, get over your wretched self--you are not the attraction!"
I do not actually enjoy snubbing pushy people, especially when they're still growing, but I believe it is a sin to bow to Haman, to collude in the abuse of my own people, by encouraging extrovert manners. If extroverts really want to be friendly, they must learn to recognize those of us who don't suffer from their tragic condition, and tone themselves down accordingly. For a start, if people are not holding eye contact with you, that means they're not interested in your chatter. Turn off that inner monkey! Then, when people are looking at you, all that can be achieved by continuing to call them is convincing them that something is wrong with your brain, but if for some reason you did need to call a customer--as it might be because another customer was looking for him or her--customers' names are either "Sir" or "Ma'am," and if it is necessary for you to speak before you are spoken to, you always begin with "Please excuse me."
If the insolent attitude McDonald's encourages, the attitude of "I'm the attraction and I'm the boss and I decide when and how I'm 'being friendly,' for which those worthless dregs who pay my salary ought to be grateful," is based on a belief that their customers are poor people, it's even more misguided than I would have guessed. Most of their customers are not particularly poor people. The welfare class, who live on food stamps and vouchers, seldom go to restaurants.
I did see one man use McDonald's as a place to get through hard times; he went in and ate, slowly, while talking to employers and landlords and lawyers, and apparently negotiated a change of jobs and addresses at the same time.
What really put me off McDonald's was that the company apparently mandated that the building and its grounds be sprayed with chemical poisons regularly. I've seen customers cough and sneeze as toxic vapors blew in through the closed windows. I missed some scheduled work days, while working from McDonald's, due to reactions to glyphosate sprayed on the grass on the days when I was there. In relation to me, if you spray glyphosate even when I'm not present, you need to bear in mind throughout the rest of the time you know me--which will be brief--that you'd be easier to forgive if you had only walked up and clawed a strip off my arm. Contrary to corporate marketing propaganda, glyphosate is a toxic, corrosive chemical that causes bleeding and tissue damage and other injuries, and most definitely does promote cancer. Yiu are not a nonviolent person if you spray this poison. Your communication with me really needs to begin with "I know there's no excuse for the violent injury I did to you. Thank you for letting me live. I know it would be more profitable to dig up kudzu roots with my bare toes than to try to poison any plant. I know five hundred thousand dollars is a contemptible offer in the direction of compensation, but please forgive my worthlessness and accept what I can offer. I will never, never, never spray anything but water outdoors again.""
I'd agree that McDonald's does, very deliberately identify itself as a "back row" place. The food is probably no worse than what many customers would cook at home, and may be better--though it's certainly not health food. The clientele probably have a lower average income in cities where rich people have more restaurant options. The bizarre balance between free wi-fi that encourages people to spend whole days in or outside McDonald's, and the "eat-and-run" attitude, seems to sabotage either the goal of functioning as a "community center" or the goal of becoming anyone's favorite restaurant; people linger, but they don't enjoy lingering. Employees' lack of respect is probably the biggest factor in turning people who have other alternatives against McDonald's.
I'd agree that, although many of the Billions Served don't like McDonald's--one big reason why people refuse to go there is that they've eaten the food before--any business that simply provides a safe, dry place where people can meet and work things out for themselves is likely to do much more for poor people than a "community center" run by social workers. People left to themselves focus on meeting their own needs. Social workers distract people from meeting their needs with a lot of irrelevant use of taxpayers' money to meet the social workers' own emotional needs, and can spend vast amounts of time and resources without bringing an actual poor person one step closer to anything person actually wants.
A useful experiment for Arnade to make, now that he's seen the benefits McDonald's can have for the Billions Served, might be to open a restaurant that serves "back row" people (some one-dollar menu items; liberal use of parking lots, restrooms, and WiFi) without alienating "front row" people (tone the color scheme down to brown or beige; broadcast soft instrumental music or none; offer some fresh, locally grown, unsprayed food along with the junk; hire nice quiet people who can look cheerful without grinning or shrieking, appreciate them, and try to train the loud ones to be like them). And, of course, pay staff to do actual gardening, raising edible food--no poisoned bermudagrass in sight!
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