Excerpt: Who among us, including landed gentry and nobility with four-hundred-year-old castles, are not always already nouveaux in our riches?
Barack Obama must have expected some sense of shock and awe when he announced that he would be hosting a 60th birthday celebration for 500 guests and 200 workers. After all, he is the darling of liberals everywhere, a Nobel prize winner, a man who garnered a sixty million dollar advance for books, a friend to Very Famous People everywhere. Instead, he was widely eviscerated for what could turn out to be a superspreader event. The criticism came from all sides, from the right and the left and everywhere in the middle.
Maureen Dowd’s critical August 14 op-ed, “Behold Barack Antoinette,” drew the ire of many. It was, characteristically for Dowd, part history— an accounting of the coolest and first Black president—and part analysis. There was much that was sharply critical of the former president but perhaps the most socially damning assertion she made, and the one that must have stung the Obamas and their friends, was that they are part of the nouveaux riches. Her point raised hackles and snickers, with some charging racism (why shouldn’t Black people enjoy the luxuries of life is, in fact, a legitimate question) and others agreeing that the Obamas are in fact mere new money. But this raises the question: what, exactly, is old money anyway and who among us, including landed gentry and nobility with four-hundred-year-old castles, are not always already nouveaux in our riches?
Obama is used to being criticised for his deportation rates (more than George W. Bush before him), his callous disregard for lives abroad affected by American militarism, his drone strikes, his inability to actually make economic oligarchs pay for their ruinous ways even when he had the chance, and more. With his signature cool, he has shrugged all of that off his finely cut suits. In the world in which he travels now—populated by multi-billionaires and celebrities of the likes of Tom Hanks and Oprah—death, destruction, and the dismantling of everyday people’s lives don’t count for much. All of that is, after all, what sustains their lifestyles (there is no massive wealth without the economic degradation and even slaughter of millions). But, ouch, nouveaux riches?
To be clear, the phrase is not used by Dowd but, rather, by André Leon Talley, who was once an admirer of Michelle Obama’s style, back in the Days of Innocence And When They Were Gods. Talley has since descended into some infamy, to do with his own lack of property: it turns out that he is, alas, merely a renter in arrears (the Times discreetly labelled him “dispossessed”). Dowd quotes him sniffing haughtily: “I think the nouveaux riches Obamas are seriously tone-deaf…in Marie Antoinette, tacky, let-them-eat-cake mode. They need to remember their humble roots.”
I’m guessing Talley was never invited to the birthday bash.
Talley is a former creative director and editor at large at Vogue magazine; his story is that of a young, poor but not indigent Black man in the segregated South who made his way into the upper echelons of society. The world of fashion, over which Vogue, its editor in chief Anna Wintour, and Talley have long held sway, is entirely about reinvention. Coco Chanel, whose style and designs defined fashion for decades made her way from a French orphanage, up through dalliances and alliances with Nazis, and into whatever constituted high society in Europe. As for Martha’s Vineyard, sixty-three percent of its residents are the seasonal sort: vacationers. Most of the people who live there are celebrities and CEOs, with a sprinkling of “old” families like the descendants of merchant mariners who made their money being … merchant mariners.
We could look to Ye Old Englande, whose tourism depends on the fiction of old, old, money, with places like Highclere Castle, one of the sites where Downton Abbey was filmed. The castle itself was completed in 1679 but the estate came into being in 749, when the land was granted to the Bishop of Winchester. You could glance at this history on the Wikipedia page and be awed by how far back the place goes (it’s even referenced in the Doomsday Book), but the fact remains that it has always represented the transformation of land into a commodity which, when you think about it, is the definition of “new money.” Putting aside the historic exploitation of peasantry and other riff-raff that always accompanies the grand bestowals of property, any and every castle in England is fundamentally about money being made off the backs of domestic proles and exploited and brutalised populations worldwide. This is true of Highclere Castle, of Hearst Castle in San Simeon, and of the Obamas’ estate in Martha’s Vineyard.
We might also consider Hyde Park, where I live, home to the University of Chicago. The institution was built in 1890 (mostly), a baby among universities and very deliberately modeled after Oxbridge: new Uni, if you will. If you walk around some of the buildings at, say, dusk, you might expect a fourteenth-century monk to emerge from the shadows, making his way to dinner. But the university is also a massive land-grabber: it owns much of the land around it and has quietly and steadily become the biggest landlord in the area. Businesses can’t open in the neighbourhood without the university’s permission (the exceptions are those like the Medici restaurant, which has owned its buildings for decades). And of course, there’s the Obama connection, with his Obama Presidential Center foisted on top of historic Jackson Park, one of the last remaining such creations designed by Frederick Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. There has been resistance to the Center from the start and it was recently reported that it will take $700 million to build it, and $40 million to operate it for one year alone, after construction. The foundations of the building haven’t even been laid yet, and this behemoth is already bleeding money, with top staff agreeing to take pay cuts. The foundation that runs the OPC recently received gifts of over $1 million from the Michael Jordan and the Open Society Foundations, the latter run by George Soros, the billionaire who made his money as an investor. Michael Jordan made his money as a basketball player.
The point here is not to sneer at all the new money on display everywhere but simply to point out that its imagined opposite, “old money,” is a fictitious entity. Antiques become antiques over time, and the patina they acquire is treasured: if you want an artifact to maintain its value on the auction market, you don’t scrub it but allow centuries of dirt and grime to dull its original lustre. In the film Knives Out, the young character Hugh Drysdale names himself “Ransom” and wears Aran sweaters that are ragged at the collar and sleeves because he understands instinctively that people of “old money” are the ones who don’t have to care about the state of their clothes, that worn items signal a comfort and ease of access in the world. When he tells Detective Benoit Blanc, investigating the film’s central murders, about his “ancestral home,” Blanc laughs at him: “That is hooey! [Your grandfather], he bought this place in the 80’s from a Pakistani real estate millionaire…”
Highclere Castle is hell to occupy, and until Downton Abbey came along to film itself there, the occupants, the 8th Earl of Carnarvon and his wife, were scrambling to keep up the estate, faced with crumbling interiors and exteriors (can you imagine the housekeeping required?). The popularity of the television series brings new streams of visitors and much-needed revenue for upkeep, but it’s a struggle (the pandemic can’t have helped). Only a constant flow of cold, hard, new money flowing in can keep the place in existence.
There are no nouveaux riches for the simple reason that money, unlike wine, doesn’t age well. It has to constantly rebirth itself or die, and its survival depends on the decimation of property and people. There is no “old money,” only the constant and endlessly renewable and rapacious force of capitalism itself.
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See also my “Obama’s Birthday Bash Is For Neoliberal Elites.”
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