On a bright September Saturday in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, a large, happy and slightly drunk crowd rested on picnic blankets, taking in this year's free Shakespeare in the Park production of "Love's Labors Lost." Sipping wine, noshing bread and cheese, the crowd was pleasantly oblivious to the extraordinary socioeconomic achievement that makes possible cultural amenities like Shakespeare in the Park, and to the peril that achievement now faces.
It's what I call the bourgeois achievement; the creation and gradual expansion of a large, broad-based middle class -- the fruit of 600 years of economic progress the Western world has enjoyed since the Renaissance. It is the middle class -- the oft-maligned "bourgeoisie" -- and its hard-won economic surplus that propels so many civilized pleasantries taken for granted; urban parks and free outdoor theatre, public basketball courts and national forests, free clinics and high school dances, the idea of human rights and the concept of the weekend.
But as the gap between rich and poor grows, that middle class shrinks and grows weary. Census Bureau statistics show the share of income controlled by the wealthiest 5 percent of Americans increased from 16.6 percent to 21.2 percent between 1969 and 1994. During the same period the poorest Americans lost about as much ground as the rich gained, and are in fact laboring under an increasing deficit.
In an economic double-whammy, the middle class has had to work longer hours to finance not only the debt from below but the boom at the top -- for it's the middle class who have taken the brunt of corporate downsizing, competition from cheap foreign labor, and domestic automation. Twenty-one percent of Americans now work more than 49 hours a week, according to the U.S. Labor Department, and 9 percent work 60 hours a week or more.
Not only do the middle class have less time, they have less money too. In 1971 almost 43 percent of American families made the equivalent (in today's dollars) of $25,000 to $50,000 a year. Today only 32 percent do. Furthermore, since 1973 the median family income has risen a scant 2 percent.
In short, the middle class has less precious little time and precious little extra capitol to invest in such bourgeois "luxuries" as libraries, community music programs, and public theatre.
If the middle class continues to shrink those cultural amenities built with the bourgeois's surplus cash may simply disappear, or become vehicles for corporate advertising. I don't know whether the bourgeois achievement can be saved by anything short of a dramatic redistribution of wealth. But it's clear the middle class is under siege. If the future generations are to enjoy weekends in the park with Shakespeare, that siege will, somehow, have to be lifted.
Michael Mattis was the editor of Prism last semester.
[ Golden Gater - November 7, 1996 ]
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