117 Steps...

..from the Montgomery Street BART stop to Montgomery Street is what I take when it rains, as if I worked in John Hickenlooper's Denver Capitol office, he of the bowls of fruit and no elevator policy. The BART also allows me a few minutes to read on the way to work, or, this morning, grade the How Elite Am I test that Baleen, Abigail's mom and I took the other week*.

It's from Coming Apart, the don't call it class warfare book that's got the NYT editorial staff throwing spitballs across their virtual desks. David Brooks wants it required reading, up there with Huck Finn and Bowling Alone; Paul Krugman says, It's the Economy, Stupid, or the disappearing, decent wage jobs for the non-college educated working class, stupid, and Nicky Kristoff says, Well, there's something to that, Paul, but when I think of my hometown, little old Yarhill, Oregon, population 925, I see what he means.

What he means is that it's not just the 99% versus the 1%, it's the top 20% versus the bottom 30%. And to make matters worse, the top 20% used to look a lot like the bottom 30% fifty years ago, but since then, they've created that very signficant gap by doing the things that the bottom 30% professes to do, but doesn't really do, he says, like work hard, go to church, raise children in a two-parent household and get a college degree. Yikes. There are oodles and oodles or charts to back up these claims, claims that have been made in other places, by other people, and they are done as dispassionatly as possible to let the charts tell the story, not adjectives or exclamation points. It's worth a read, and then a discussion with friends over dinner, but if you're going to do that, and if you're in San Francisco, Boston or Austin, you might not want to serve Baleen's snap pea soup, lest you end up with egg all over your face.

* By this measure, Abigail's mom, Baleen and I are somewhere between "a second-generation (or more) upper-middle-class person who has made a point of getting out a lot" and "a first-generation middle-class person with middle-class parents." Abigail's mom scored the lowest of us all, hampered by her two parents in "high-prestige jobs", Baleen was smack in the middle, and I was on top, most likely due to the efforts of my parents, especially my father, who, when I was thirteen years old and we were looking to move to where they live now, the gated, Virginia community, checked out the bike racks at the local pool on a hot summer day and said, "I don't know, there are no bikes here. The kids get their parents to drive them to the pool."