In an essay about how he’s downsizing, minimizing, buddhizing, living more modestly, happily, mindfully and meaningfully, Arthur Brooks writes this:
We’d moved two years before, from Bethesda, Maryland, a power suburb of Washington, D.C., to a small town outside Boston. I’d resigned from a chief-executive position to teach and write, trading away virtually all day-to-day contact with political and business elites—and was quickly forgotten by most. I hadn’t hidden the reason for the move, and my family was fully behind it: I was taking my own advice, published in these pages three years ago, to find a new kind of success and a deeper kind of happiness.
See how he starts with UD’s ‘thesda? See that? Good move, because nothing’s quicker shorthand for wealth, power, and prestige obsessed than ‘thesda.
And l’il ol’ Needham! (Needham’s where he lives now.) Thready needy little Needham, inelite downpowered Needham!
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The graphic ‘thesda/Needham contrast jumps out at you in the raw numbers, a disjunction in human fates that instantly brought to UD’s mind Engels’ Condition of the Working Class in England:
Estimated 2007 median income for a family in Needham: $144,042
Estimated 2007 median income for a family in Bethesda: $168,385
And not only that!
Needham and Edgartown [will now] join Nantucket, Chilmark, Weston, Aquinnah, Wellesley, Dover, Newton, Vineyard Haven, Belmont, Brookline, Lexington, Winchester, and Lincoln [as places that] Zillow defines [as] “$1 million cities” [–] those with a typical home value of at least $1 million.
As he huddles in his Harvard office (Brooks is at Harvard), far from America’s elites, then shuffles back to his humble hamlet, Brooks can take comfort in the knowledge that he has decisively traded in grasping predatory ‘thesda for a kinder gentler world.
February 9th, 2022 at 4:00PM
Couldn’t that Brooks essay be reduced to something like “The world is too much with us, late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers?”
February 10th, 2022 at 7:18AM
Yes – and those Wordsworth lines are now so standard a part of the sermon Brooks is giving that I’m surprised they don’t appear in the essay. Maybe they appear in the book from which the essay is taken.
February 10th, 2022 at 3:48PM
Yes, and that would be fitting. These “is that all there is?” laments from people who are in a position to die with the most toys, whether or not they slag on Bethesda or the Capital Region more generally, strike me as phoney. But then, didn’t our Wordsworth write those lines as a reaction to the London and North Western Rly bringing hoi polloi day trippers to his Lake District?