1%

I just wrote a long post about two articles I read this morning, one posted by CNN that announces that if you live in the U.S.A. and make more than $34,000 a year after taxes, you are in the upper 1% of the global economy.  Of course I went on in a self-effacing way for blocks of texts denigrating my lifestyle.  But then came the dramatic turning point.  I also read an article in the New York Times that reports that Americans have less class mobility than people in Europe, Britain, or Canada.  But the writing was too dicey, I thought, the humor too subtle, the ironies too delicately close to the truth.  Not wanting to completely trash it, though, I decided to bring you this precis where I can recount my wit and sensibility without having to prove it.  In writing about the relationship between feeling lucky and feeling guilty, I felt most vulnerable. That was most telling and most dangerous, so I'll leave it alone lest anyone judge me.

Let me end with some categorical thinking, though.  Again, the irony is perhaps too subtle, though not for this crowd, I trust.

Americans are stupid.  So is everybody else.  I don't want to say it any other way.

I'll think about the "meanness" scale at another time.  I'll start with the commonly accepted saw that Americans are wickedly mean and aggressive and go from there.  Perhaps I'll find some news reports about that, too.