I’ve just concluded the New York leg of my Traumatized tour. Please subscribe to the calendar for future events!
Talking about class in a non-judgmental, observational way makes people in America very angry. Both American liberals and conservatives have meltdowns when we analyze class formation, because we really do not think class conflict should exist. We should all just identify as comfortably middle class—even though we own a modest $3 million home, we don’t shop at Prada. God forbid!
The description of the aristocratic/bohemian French family I observed at dinner in Paris during the heat wave made some readers very angry. I was making no moral judgments and perhaps this—to the crypto-Protestant mind—is immoral in and of itself. One reader even presumed perverse intentions on the part of two beautiful parents, who casually sported dipping necklines on a very hot evening. Perhaps my intuition that they had never suffered want or a hard day’s work evoked resentment and rage in people who, like me, had experienced crushing debt, low cash flow, and the shame and humiliation of being poor in a society that judges the poor as morally deficient. Of course it is unjust, but when I look at wealthy American families draped in philistinism, anxiety and entitlement, I see that we as a country have never known the easy going, public display of sumptuous living that comes from thousands of years of lording it over peasants and serfs.
It turns out that the working class of France has had enough of their ruling class. My observations of the elegant ease of the family and the rank misery of people working in 95-degree heat did not take into account the radical immiseration of the French suburbs, out of view from the hordes of tourists that jam Paris’ streets all year long. Macron and previous French administrations have engineered an increasingly indebted, fractious society where remnants of feudalism and the Revolution co-exist uneasily. Luxury brands are France’s only viable export business. The Left newspaper L’Humanité reported that a young man from the suburbs, who was arrested for looting, testified in court that he was hungry a lot of the time and was hoping to sell some of the goods he purloined so that he could supplement his diet, since his parents kicked him out of the house for days at a time. The riots are spreading all over Europe.
This past fall, I had an opportunity to spend some time with a counterpart to the French family of aristocrats, a Portuguese peasant. In Portugal, on a long planned vacation with my girlfriends, I found myself on a day trip into the wine country of the Douro Valley. I wasn’t paying close attention to vacation planning so I joined the tour with very little idea of what to expect. Advertised as an intimate tour, the group consisted of twenty-two pleasure seekers, including a wine loving mother/daughter pair, a honeymooning couple from South Asia, and some safari-vested boomers wearing shorts and sporting bulging veins on their legs. I mention this because the average age of the group was quite high. We visited Porto and the Douro Valley to enjoy life. In Germany, they call these tours Kaffefahrts: groups of older people board buses for trips punctuated by afternoon coffee. Retirees in China also love group tours like this one: they want to take in the sights of their country. In Portugal, the average Portuguese can’t afford to take such trips. The tours are designed to extract foreign exchange from penny-pinching pleasure seekers; relative to our own cost of living, the tour was cheap.
#Tourists #Peasants #Portugal
