Larry Benjamin's Blog: Larry Benjamin's blog - This Writer's Life - Posts Tagged "gop"

Recently, a friend of mine called me "bougie". In case you’ve never heard the term, Urban Dictionary defines bougie, a hacked truncation of the word Bourgeoisie, which refers to the middle-class in Europe, as “aspiring to be a higher class than one is.”

Now, this wasn’t the first time I’ve been called bougie. And generally, being called bougie doesn’t offend me because it calls me out for daring to dream, for striving to accomplish something. I have, after all been called other, worse things. And I don’t particularly care much what other people think of me. But being called bougie does rather irritate me because it inherently asserts that I have no right to dream, to achieve, that who I was at birth is who I should be at death.

The word bougie seems to stem from a screwed-up thought process that defines a place for everyone, a place they must always remain. I remember as a kid, when I talked back, I would be told I was “out of place.” And that was often a punishable offense. The idea that one can be out of place is disturbing because it seems to immediately call for the out of place object (in this case a person) to be put back in its proper place. Thus, the pepper is eternally returned to the side of salt.

Today our LGBT youth who do not know their place is in secret, dark places, who dare to push themselves into the open, and declare themselves, are railed against, thrown into the street by the very people who brought them into the world and thus are morally obligated to love and shelter them; our youth are beaten and driven to suicide, and killed, all because they did not know their place, these bougie gays who thought they had a right to be seen, to hold their heads high in equality.

Labeling someone bougie is also an act of erasure. This occurred to me after more than 100 days of watching Trump and the GOP try to roll back anything from the Obama administration, most notably Obamacare and now the Paris climate accord.

President Obama, in the eyes of Trump and the GOP, was just another bougie Black who didn’t know his place and thus pushed himself into places he didn’t belong and right on into the White House. Dismantling Obamacare and withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, simply because it was Obama-driven, is just their pathetic attempt to forget he stepped out of his place. They want nothing more than to erase him and his accomplishments as if he’d never existed, hadn’t done, hadn’t pushed himself where they didn’t want him, into places they think he didn’t belong.

Just as the Trump administration has scrubbed all LGBT references from the White House website. Just as they are working to strip our public schools of their ability to teach our children because those kids whose parents cannot afford $40,000 a year for private school, should not be encouraged to overstep and push themselves where they do not belong—what more effective way to derail a future Obama than to make sure he, or she, never learns enough to dream, to push?

There’s a lot of talk of white privilege, which I think is nothing more than a left-over, a remnant, like the Confederate flag, from the days when they had power over us. Today that power is mostly concentrated in the ability to stifle, to erase, those of us who are other, less than, who don’t know our place.
I see and recognize that white privilege exists and that those who have and exploit it think it is their birthright, but I don’t have to—No, I refuse to—bow down before it and let it, them, clip my wings and tell me how high I can fly.
My first book, What Binds Us, was turned down everywhere I submitted it. There was no market for a book like this, I was told. As a result, it sat in a drawer for seventeen years, until I gained the courage to submit it again. On August 1, my third full length novel (my fifth book) will be released. In large part because the world has changed, but also because I learned to step out of my place, to scream louder than anyone’s attempts to silence me, to erase me, and everyone like me.

A character in one of my unfinished manuscripts, when accused of being bougie, snaps, “Like Michael Jackson, I may have been born a poor black boy, but like Michael Jackson I intend to die a rich white woman!” His statement, though exaggerated, sums up a fundamental truth: Who we were, does not limit who we can become.

I am troubled by the times we are living in. We have a Trump-driven, GOP-supported tax “reform” bill that is nothing short of a massive transfer of wealth from the poor and middle-class, who comprise 99 percent of the U.S. population to the richest one percent. Over the weekend it was revealed Senator Bob Corker changed his “no” vote to a “yes,” after a tax break that would hand him a windfall of millions was snuck into the bill.

As I ponder the current climate, a season of excess, a world where greed is its own reward, and robbing the poor and middle class to enrich the already wealthy drapes the robbers in gilt-edged robes of glory, I am deeply disappointed. And afraid.

Sure we’ve seen this before, most recently in the Reagan area (who can forget Nancy Reagan wearing red and ordering 4,370 pieces of Lenox china (enough place settings of 19 pieces for 220 people) at a cost of more than $210,000? Who can forget the halcyon days of “Dynasty” and the Carringtons, and “Dallas” and JR Ewing (who did shoot JR?)—a period that gloried in excess: mansions and designers dresses mostly distinguished by over-sized and ridiculous shoulder pads that one could only assume were a reflection of the wearer’s outsized bank account and stock portfolio. Still, missing from that prolonged orgy of excess was the maliciousness, the sheer meanness that characterizes the current administration and its actions. Amassing more—and ensuring that more remains concentrated in as few hands as possible—has become the noble purpose of the current ruling political party.

Several events over the last year have caused me to re-examine my relationship to money, to things. First our aunt died in January, then our dad died in November. Money could not have saved either of them. When we first found out my dad was dying I asked him if there was anything he wanted. He said he just wanted to spend as much time with us, his family, as he could. Not a trip to Paris, not a Ferrari. Time. With us.

Then I left the for-profit sector after a horrific few years in corporate communications and switched to the non-profit sector, which pays considerably less well but which allows me to feel fulfilled in a way I never associated with work.

Last Saturday we had dinner with a friend we hadn’t seen in a while. She recently retired and was discussing life after work and her new awareness of money. She pointed out she had everything she needed but had to start thinking about what she bought and how she spent money. I could totally relate to that but then she mentioned a New York Times article she’d recently read about a woman who gave up shopping for a year. I was instantly intrigued. I don’t think of myself as a “shopper” but we have a lot of stuff, which I suppose is normal for two gay men of a certain age.

For example, we like cheese; we eat a lot of it. In fact, whenever we have people over for dinner, appetizers typically include a cheese plate. So I suppose in a way it is understandable that we have seven cheese knives, porcelain cheese labels, slate serving pieces that allow you to write a cheese descriptor in chalk. Still, we have seven cheese knives.

I like books, buy way too many of them…Seriously, we have more than 1,000: signed first editions, art books, leather bound books from The Easton Press, with gilt edged pages and satin ribbon markers, and numbered, limited editions with hand marbled endpapers from The Folio Society.

So, I was intrigued by the idea of not shopping. Our friend sent me the article, “My Year of No Shopping,” by Ann Patchett, Sunday morning and I read it with interest. In the article, Patchett explains:

"At the end of 2016, our country had swung in the direction of gold leaf, an ecstatic celebration of unfeeling billionaire-dom that kept me up at night. I couldn’t settle down to read or write, and in my anxiety I found myself mindlessly scrolling through two particular shopping websites, numbing my fears with pictures of shoes, clothes, purses and jewelry. I was trying to distract myself, but the distraction left me feeling worse, the way a late night in a bar smoking Winstons and drinking gin leaves you feeling worse. The unspoken question of shopping is 'What do I need?' What I needed was less."

I read her words and I thought—Yes, That’s it exactly: I need to buy less and give more. I need to share other capital—time, love, interest, resistance.

And that is exactly what I intend to do in 2018. Revisit this blog to track my progress. In the meantime, you can read Ann Patchett’s thought-provoking article here.