I’ve been thinking a little bit about the 1980s comedy Caddyshack and what that movie might tell us about our changing perceptions of the wealthy. The fellow that was originally supposed to be the main character was a young caddie who was trying to figure out how to get to college without either family money or grades good enough for a scholarship. He tries to weasel his way into a scholarship from the country club he works for.
One thing that struck me was what was similar and what was different in the lifestyles of the caddy and the country club denizens like the Judge Smails and the doctor whose name I can’t remember. The caddy’s large family (and intact) lives in a two floor house. Money is tight and his parents are obviously harried. You get the sense they work very hard, and are still having trouble making ends meet. The material differences between the caddy’s family and the usual country clubbers comes down less to material things than the consumption of leisure. The country clubbers enjoy the golf, elegant dinners (I guess), and boat rides. But here is the thing: the main difference between the country clubbers and the working-class is that the country clubbers don’t work that hard and neither do their kids. Several of the wealthy set recognize the emptiness of this life.
Enter the character of Al Czervik (played by Rodney Dangerfield.) Czervik has made huge amounts of money in real estate. He is far wealthier than the “old money” at the country club and brags about his extensive holdings. He is also a recovering workaholic. The material difference between the caddies and Czervik are actually much greater than the material differences between the caddies and the doctor or Judge Smails. The social distance between the caddies and Czervik in nonexistent. Here is an example of how wealth based on work and merit can obliterate class barriers.
How does Caddyshack look today? The perceptions of the wealthy have changed in some important ways. I can’t remember the last time I heard someone talk about “banker’s hours.” I also can’t remember any portrayals of the life or regional bank executives. The most common references to bankers that I see have been to investment bankers, and they are known for working lots of hours. I also don’t hear nearly as many jokes about doctors spending too much time on the golf course. The closest thing to a ticket to an upper middle-class life comes from great grades, lots of extracurricular activities, and lots of work hours after graduation. The parents work long hours and invest huge amounts of energy into making sure their kids do all the work they need to get into the right school and then the right job. Staying within the American elite (unless you are at the very pinnacle of wealth) seems like a lot more work than it used to be. They really do work hard, but I’m not sure that the products of our partly self-replicating meritocracy would relate to any better to the caddies of today than did the real world (as opposed to satirical) wealthy of fifty years ago.
Let’s not take this too seriously. The reality of life at all levels of the income distribution has always been complicated. Caddyshack ended up mostly as a vehicle for Rodney Dangerfield and Chevy Chase to insult people. In some ways it was dated even as it was being released (as it was partly based on the memories of its screenwriters.) But Caddyshack does give us a sense of how the wealthy were perceived at one point in time. Even as satire and broad comedy, some of those perceptions ring false today.
October 26th, 2012 | 10:00 pm
Interesting. So the wealthy of today are far more democratic in their need and desire to work all the time, and have no time for pursuits of leisure like golf.
This still makes for great distance between this new group and the caddies, but in a different way. Czervik worked hard like the caddy’s families, so he had similar tastes (and background) as them, and he didn’t truly enjoy the leisured pursuits that the old money country club types (when was the last time you heard “Country Club Republican”?)
With leisure came at least the possibility for good taste or style and an appreciation of decorum all required for the proper pursuits of leisure. But Czernik sees that all as a snobbery worthy of ridicule. In this case it is true. So the new elite is snobbish about its hard work and merit. It has its pride in rightful accumulation through knowledge and work, and it holds the caddies in disdain because it sees nothing nobler in life than its own expert accumulation.
The the few caddies that remain are probably in college–working while in school to gain a career where they can find more demanding and remunerative work as they aspire to enter the meritocracy. But perhaps there is resentment amongst the caddies, because the new wealthy are too busy working and have less time for golf. The caddies are unemployed and have leisure, but have no opportunity for which to enjoy their leisure.
What about the Chevy Chase and Bill Murray characters? There seems to be some duality or mutuality in a shared decadence from different positions. Maybe not.
I haven’t seen this movie in a few years, but I used to love it. Sorry to hear that it comes across as dated.
October 26th, 2012 | 11:25 pm
What on earth is a “partly self-replicating meritocracy”?
What makes an individual “meritorious” is the moral quality of their life. Mules work hard and pet cats don’t. Neither are morally improved by it. One of the most pestilent ideas in America is that either labor or leisure changes moral choice or impacts moral consequences. Morality is in the heart, not in the neighborhood, nor in the workplace, nor in the vacation spot.
A rich man is a man that has money. Nothing more and nothing less. All money does morally is to increase the impact your behavior has on others. A millionaire can found a charity and a poor man can contribute to it. The moral generosity involved is the same in either case, it is merely the exterior, circumstantial impact which changes.
The delusion that more is better and that mere circumstances make a moral difference, rather than merely a factual one, are a horrible albatross around the neck of more people in this country than I could possibly count.
Everybody wants “enough”, enough money, enough leisure, or even enough labor. But the only way you can ever have enough is to know how much is enough. No one is more clueless about this than the typical American. Thus everything we do and everything we have is like drinking salt water, increasing our thirst rather than slaking it.
“Enough” is largely a judgment to be made in each individual heart, but how many of us have any basis for judgment there? Not many, I think. But a person of real merit has at least this starting point: enough is what is necessary in order to do right, extra is what else is there, and too much is the amount that allows us to confuse more with better.
October 27th, 2012 | 7:23 am
John, I wouldn’t say that. I would say something more like “the perception is that more of our wealthy work and study harder to get and/or stay where they are than they used to.” There is still time for leisure, but the perception of vast tracts of idle time isn’t there as much. I look at the Chase character as one who is trying to reject the materialism and snobbery of his set (and even the idea of competition – until the competition is set up as one of right vs. wrong.) The movie is pretty ambivalent about his character. He isn’t willing to step away from the club or stop spending his dad’s money and he doesn’t like himself for those reasons. His desire to avoid competition is shown to be, in large measure, a fear of losing. I think he, rather than Dangerfield was supposed to be the alternative role model for the caddy. I think that we are, for better and worse (though probably more better than worse), farther from a competition-rejecting (or even competition-deemphasizing) wealthy set than we were forty years ago.
Joseph, what I mean is that it is easier for parents in (disproportionately intact) wealthier families to get kinds into the “right” classes, supervise them in extracurricular activities, get them into the right activities and generally punch cards for getting into competitive schools. This takes a lot of work on the part of the kids of course. This is stuff that guys like Charles Murray and Chris Hayes would somewhat agree with.
October 27th, 2012 | 11:40 am
As for Caddyshack, well, I never had that positive a reaction to it, with the exception of the BillMurray monologues and gopher-hunts. The Dangerfield character is just too much of a jerk, and the caricature of the country-club types just too much of a, well, caricature. Overall, the imperative for National Lampoon style humor over-rode whatever serious social-scene meditations were potentially there, and IMO made the film less funny than it could have been.
But I really like this post, and Joseph’s comment also, even though he isn’t entirely tracking with Pete. Joseph seems to be saying, “why so focused on class?” “Why not stay focused on the natural classiness of the virtuous behavior that Americans of all social classes are free to cultivate?” On that latter score, Joseph perhaps joins my basic Sunday-school aversion to the Dangerfield character.
But Joseph, there is a reason some of us pomocons are a bit focused on class. The reason is, doing it in the spirit of Tocqueville, as opposed to Marx, does seem to bring out real truths about our lives. Lawler set the template here–see the David Brooks-focused essay “The Limits of the American Utopian Imagination” (in Stuck with Virtue) especially. Or consider my songbook essay “A Muse for the Middle,” which says the following:
“Part of the answer has to do with post-WWII young persons trying to live authentically,which among other things involved trying to live true to the fact that their lives were wed to a zone between the low and the high. …They were in the middle, more Beatnik or Mod than they could hope to be Okie or Hep-Cat, but on the other hand having no invitations to and little desire to attend the Society ball. (Something called Society, whose death twitches may be observed in the Whit Stillman films, still existed as a key social fact.)”
Pete’s point above is that you also see its death twitches in Caddyshack.
“Tocqueville had said in the 1830s that the tone of democratic times is dominated by the middle-class. He had also said, contrary to all the hot-headed Marxisant thought which eclipsed his reputation for a century, that such times are characterized by a relative equality of opportunity and education that is ultimately far more socially significant than any dynamic caused by capitalist production. By the 1960s, facts on the ground were more clearly vindicating these claims than ever before. In Britain, the Mod was somehow both gritty working class and fashion-savvy white-collar. In America, the universities, strongholds of Society, threw open their gates to the middle-classes and non-WASPs as never before, and their students thus became (officially) both intellectual elite and democratic mass. It is not surprising that such persons would seek to find a middling aesthetic ground between, say, Elvis Presley and Dylan Thomas…the creation of the rock sound and identity was partly a response to a new social situation.”
You see why we’re a bit class-obsessed? Especially now that we are all supposed to belong to one big class? It can explain rock, and even our changed attitudes toward golf! Anyhow, a fine comment, Joseph.
October 27th, 2012 | 1:16 pm
“One of the most pestilent ideas in America is that either labor or leisure changes moral choice or impacts moral consequences. Morality is in the heart, not in the neighborhood, nor in the workplace, nor in the vacation spot.”
Actually what resides in the heart is sentimentalism. Morality resides in our choices and actions, at least if Aristotle knew what he was talking about. Consequently the neighborhood, the workplace, the vacation spot and everywhere we go represent the backdrop in which our moral character is on display by virtue of the choices and actions we make in those settings. Caddyshack’s setting in a golf club is just another of those settings and its character’s, with their diverse pedigree’s, class associations, etc. represent the archetypes and the virtues and vices associated with those archetypes the writers are exploiting to tell their, admittedly low-brow, story.
The fact is that Pete’s gloss on Caddyshack is a common trope in farces going as far back as Roman times, where the wealthy aristocrats were decedant and incompetent and it was the clever slave that was running everything. See “Something happened on the way to the Coliseum” as an excellent modern send up of the same theme. A great recent film drawing on this same topic would be Gosford Park where the aristocrats were all revealed as absolutely useless and it was Helen Mirren’s character and the servants, that demonstrated the greatest qualities associated with merit.
So Joseph’s rejoinder to Pete is better directed at the long history of comedic writers and playwrights that seem to continually draw on this trope as an, often very successful, theme in farce.
I would suggest the answer for its prevalance in story-telling is that, as is the case in all good comedy, the humor draws on a hidden or forbidden truth, that the virtuous and meritorious qualities we observe often come from the classes of people that typically defy our society’s views of aristocracy or elitism. I believe Jefferson described this as the ‘natural aristocracy’.
Having said this, I think Caddyshack is a poor specimen of the genre. I think a more apt one would be “Rushmore”.
October 27th, 2012 | 3:50 pm
The best definition of class distinctions I’ve ever seen is the title of the book on wealthy Jews in the Gilded Age, Our Crowd. As far as I can see, class is always defined by “the others”, who are not part of “our crowd”.
In that sense, class hierarchy is more circumstantial than essential here. We started with the collusion of, among others, a Boston brewer, a Philadelphia printer, and a couple of Virginia landowners in a land where the class significance of owning land for others to farm was tenuous at best. None of “the others” could be peasants, tied to the land in a social arrangement held together by entail and primogeniture–in fact, we explicitly prohibited both, and replaced Europe’s peasants with slaves–human property beyond the pale of any structure of class.
We replaced class with money, and we replaced entail and primogeniture with “enterprise” that always lived at least just across the line from fraud and sometimes on the other side of that line.
This has left us in a confused and contradictory culture ever since. But it makes clear that if class is essentially defined by “the others” in relation to “our crowd”, it exists in America only as a helter skelter patch quilt of separated, and dehierarchitized sub-groups ranging from the members of the Social Register to the members of the Crips, the Bloods, and Hell’s Angels.
And this returns us, once again to money and enterprise as the only American lingua franca of who is who and what is what. Caddyshack is a comedy because everything else that apes the European landed gentry class structure is, over here at least, fundamentally arbitrary, an artificial imposition with no serious relation to our history as there is in Europe.
October 27th, 2012 | 4:03 pm
Moreover, I would have to reject the notion that morality is merely confined to our choices and actions as a reductivism that renders the label meaningless, draining from it the intention and will that makes possible the notion of “moral responsibility”.
The mule and the cat I mentioned above commit actions and make choices just like we do, but these hardly come under the umbrella of moral responsibility.
Will and intention are in the heart solely and only indirectly displayed in our actions and our choices.
October 27th, 2012 | 5:00 pm
Joseph, by saying morality resides in our choices and actions I was not intending to suggest that in the reductionistic sense but rather that it is in our actions that moral character reveals itself. It’s origins are manifold, but I suspect wisdom, not sentimentalism, is a more common source.
However, I found this comment of yours interesting:
“As far as I can see, class is always defined by “the others”, who are not part of “our crowd”.”
I find this interesting since one root word for aristocracy is arete’ or ‘excellence’. Let me suggest that while there are an infinite variety of false hierarchies (gold star for anyone who recognizes the subtle pun) in society, that at some point they all implicitly, though perhaps subliminally, are motivated by some presumption of what is excellent however counterfeit many of these presuppositions may be. In which case there presumably are at least some forms of hierarchy that are legitimate, else one would have to preclude the possibility of excellence altogether.
And before you begin an argument against the idea of excellence let me warn you that we already have you on record preaching about the virtues and excellencies of Belgian beers, Chamay, in particular if I recall.
In which case my previous post is relevant in as much these story lines juxtaposing false and true forms of aristocracy are really about what is and what isn’t ‘excellence’.
October 27th, 2012 | 7:44 pm
Pseudo, I’m no Kantian in morals, but I thought I ought to correct the record. Regardless of my intentions, I should say that I was the one discoursing on the excellence of Chimay. But, on second thought, the excellence of that beer may just be my class speaking–imposing a law on ancient craftsmanship. In my heart, and as a representative of the class subject to which we all find ourselves, I intended to be democratic following a universal maxim. However, I found that I was acting for pseudo-aristocratic ends. My bad.
October 27th, 2012 | 8:12 pm
Ah. And here I thought I was being clever. Mistake noted.
Joseph, you’re free to refute the principle of excellence.
October 27th, 2012 | 9:10 pm
“Let me suggest that while there are an infinite variety of false hierarchies (gold star for anyone who recognizes the subtle pun) in society, that at some point they all implicitly, though perhaps subliminally, are motivated by some presumption of what is excellent however counterfeit many of these presuppositions may be. In which case there presumably are at least some forms of hierarchy that are legitimate, else one would have to preclude the possibility of excellence altogether.”
I see….I think.
Excellence is sometimes found in the maddest places, sometimes even in private schools and Ivy League colleges. And I suppose there are those individuals who do an outstanding job of inheriting the family fortune.
I seldom reveal my true mind about many things, but I can, perhaps point at something with a personal story. My father suffered from COPD and used oxygen in the last years of his life. Even with this, he would drift in and out of hazy reverie depending on whether his pulse/ox was high or low. Once, while I was sitting with him, he suddenly became very focused and clear and said, “One day just I woke up and discovered that I was a sick old man. Where did the time go? Where did it go?”
I had no answer. But even after 60 years, I know precisely where my own time went. It did not go into any attempt at excellence, it went into the quest for knowledge, which I pursued without reck to the detriment of any fame, wealth, or engagement with transient pleasures.
Knowledge I have, in some small measure, gained, and because of it I can die with confidence. Those who can do that are the true “aristocrats” of the world. And there is no special place where you will find them.
And beer is only beer in the end.
October 27th, 2012 | 10:48 pm
Joseph, yours is a painful and poignant story. But isn’t knowledge a kind of excellence–even if it is a knowledge born of experience? And isn’t that the riddle? Should you have known better? Yes. Could you have known better? No. Or perhaps maybe. Nonetheless, the truth of your story cannot be denied. Thanks for telling us the story.
October 28th, 2012 | 3:13 pm
Josephy, my condolences for your father. And I apologize for what I now realize was an overly wordy, multiclaused, explanation of my thinking.
However, you clearly understood my intent, and your response I think clears things up a bit for me as well. The point of difference seem to be what you see as truly worthy of being considered excellent and what are false substitutes.
It seems you merit knowledge as such an excellence, but have a rather jaundiced view of qualities like ambition, or industriousness at least as they apply to private enterprise.
I think a worthy discussion on this could certainly be had, especially since I have a foot in each space, as it were, but I suspect that discussion should be left for another thread.
Thanks for the thoughtful exchange.
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