Op-Ed
Cold Toes and Other Woes: Toward a Collegetown Class Consciousness
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Cosmology on the Rocks
Cosmology on the Rocks
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I’m staring my thermostat in the face. He says it’s 65 degrees in the apartment. My extremities say otherwise. We chat.
“Dear sir,” I begin politely, “have you been serviced lately?”
No response.
“Do you know it’s not really 65 in my room? I know because my nose is cold and I’m burrowed under my three blankets and I’m still cold. Why do you only see the hallway, sir, when the world is so much wider than that? The temperature is lower out there in the peripheries.”
He suspects my diction for its mild hints of universalist preaching, which offends his provincial — or plastic — sensibilities.
I wrack my brain for some way to stop this tragicomedy of the industrial commodity gone wrong, for I am its self-pitying victim. I am cold, and I am modern man, which means I have no ability to fend for myself in the wild. But this isn’t the wild, it is worse: it is the fictional bubble of cozy modernity, periodically invaded by the cold drafts of the outside. Which isn’t so bad, only you’re trapped inside. If your thermostat is acting up, you can’t just go and get firewood, because you’re in Collegetown. So you need the heat to work desperately, and you’ll drill just about anywhere to keep it coming. That is why modern commercial society is free, but also a prison, even for those at the top, and certainly for nature itself.
You realize it in those moments when your toes are cold; they are important moments, even if they pass quickly enough into happier thoughts, or Gore-Tex lined socks.
I could, of course, go to the library, where it’s very warm and they have pictures of old white men on the walls, who tell you in deep voices, “You can be old and white one day too, young Jedi. Just keep being white.” But I don’t want to get old; I only want to get warm. Besides, if I go to the library, the old white men remind me that my hard-working parents spend 40K a year so I can sit in such a library all day. And this is the last thing I want to remember in this fun little reverie I’m having: that I am not a poor college student.
I know that some college students are poor and have to take out loans. It is those honorable men and women, in fact, who have given the rest of us this myth of the pauperized intellectual. You know, the dude in your econ class who says he is “so poor right now,” so no, he can’t chip in for beer this weekend, until he goes to the ATM and takes out more of his parents’ money. If this is you, don’t be insulted, because minus the econ bit, it’s me too. And it doesn’t really matter whether you are poor or not; if you really were, you probably wouldn’t be bragging about it.
Bragging about poverty, then, is unique to people who aren’t poor, but who note jokingly after a big weekend that they’re pretty low on cash. The Bourgeois Poor. We aren’t poor; we are just your friendly neighborhood liars.
United only by our common phrase, “dude, I’m so poor,” we aren’t much of a class. But, don’t worry, friends, for I’ve gone and written us our own Manifesto, just to get things out in the open!
Ehem! And I now present the Manifesto of the Bourgeois Poor Party:
“A spectre is haunting America — and it ain’t Communism, Senator McCarthy! It’s socioeconomic comfort masked as poverty, of all things! That’s right! Welcome to the Manifesto of the Bourgeois Poor Party, where we Party until we’re Poor, and then go to the ATM and realize we aren’t really poor! In fact, this is not a Manifesto at all, but a Party! Like, a kegger!
“Still, we ought to make some demands. Firstly, of ourselves: we should stop lying. The End.”
And that pretty much sums it up. This is why political movements shouldn’t be self-conscious of the lies they tell: their platforms would be awfully short, and party hacks would be pretty bored.
I think I can say, then, that we, the Bourgeois Poor, have been honest enough to doom ourselves to political failure as a party. Which is good, because I can’t really imagine such a party anyway. It doesn’t sound like much fun. So perhaps we should do the opposite of forming a political party: be honest.
If daddy pays the bills, daddy pays the bills. There is nothing to be ashamed of there, but there is a danger in the misguided politics that comes from denying it. That danger is not to my cold toes; it is to the real poor.
Jeremy Siegman is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at jsiegman@cornellsun.com. Cosmology on the Rocks appears alternate Fridays.
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