Splitsville TOWARD AN ENHANCED CLASSY CONSCIOUSNESS

The Still-Alive-and-Kicking Newsletter for Subscribers to THE SPLIT

Our question: Is Donald Trump a classy guy?

Your answer: Who cares, fuck you, get serious.

How right you are! But still. We ask, because no matter how obvious the answer is, the topic is more interesting than it might appear.

First: No, of course Donald Trump is not a classy guy. In fact, he’s the exact opposite of classy. We know this because a) he’s a big fat lying fuckhead; b) his taste, as embodied in his residences, as seen in Mar-a-Lago and Trump Tower (in the style that architecture critic Martin Filler calls “high-roller glitz”) is the opposite of classy, and c) his behavior, such as it is, presents a series of values and personality traits diametrically, nay, dialectically at odds with classiness.

Which brings us to the next question, which is, what do we mean by “classy”?

It is, by now, a somewhat old-fashioned term. Characters in movies these days don’t say, as they used to, “You got class, kid,” or “Dat dere’s one classy broad.” Still, it’s not some Shakespearean archaism that needs translating, like, oh, say, cordwainer (“a person who makes shoes”). We know what it means. We know it’s meant as a complement, that it’s never said grudgingly (like, “You’ve got a point”) but, rather, admiringly. And it’s often offered with an undercurrent of gratitude.

Why?

Because to be classy, to have class, is to do something generous for or to someone else, possibly at your own expense, when you don’t “have to.” Or it means standing up for a principle when no one—or, at least, no one whose opinion you’d respect—would have blamed you for acting otherwise.

Here’s an example of the latter: Regardless of what you think about David Letterman, we recall an incident in his career where he could have behaved one way but elected to behave in another. When it was clear he was a big hit on CBS tv, someone—his agent, his lawyer, his manager—said, “Let’s re-negotiate your contract. We can get more money.” And Letterman’s response was to say, in essence, “No. A deal’s a deal. This is fine.”

Who does that?

Now, granted, the original deal was paying him twenty million dollars. So it’s not as though he nobly suffered economic harm while hewing to his principles. On the other hand, this was national, big-money show biz. Most of the people one deals with at that level are probably conscience-free scumbags who will do you no favors and cut you loose if it suits them. (Cf. MSNBC’s treatment of Joy Reid and Alex Wagner.) Careers are unpredictable, the public is fickle, the zeitgeist changes, and a single scandal can end it all. So no one would have blamed Letterman if he had thought, “Better get it while I can”—which is to say, succumb to socially- or professionally-validated greed.

Of course, you don’t have to be in show business to feel the pressure, or at least the permission, to indulge in (or to fully embrace) greed. From the capitalist pornography of Ayn Rand to Michael Douglas’s Gordon Gekko announcing, in the movie Wall Street, “Greed is good. Greed works,” everybody and his dog knows that we are born into a world in which one of the Prime Directives (depending on your upbringing and religion, there can be more than one) is, “Get all you can.” Everyone acknowledges this to one degree or another, and everyone balances obedience to it with other needs and desires. (Nuns and monks acknowledge it by turning their backs on it.) It’s no wonder, then, that a colloquialism would arise denoting someone who deliberately defies it when they don’t really have to. We call them “classy.”

This is ironic, since the original meaning of “classy” was “pertaining to or characteristic of a (high) class.” And that’s how it’s used in Irving Berlin’s “Top Hat, White Tie, and Tails” for the Fred Astaire movie Top Hat in 1935:

I'm steppin' out, my dear
To breathe an atmosphere
That simply reeks with class
And I trust that you'll excuse my dust
When I step on the gas

It would be interesting to resuscitate Irving Berlin and ask him, “What did you mean by ‘reeks with class’?” Of course, the song is about formal clothing and personal grooming, although we’d like to know the constituent parts of that “atmosphere.” These days, in the benighted era of Trump II, “beautiful, clean coal,” “drill, baby, drill,” and attacks on the EPA, we’d re-write that lyric thus:

I’m stayin’ in, my dear
To flee an atmosphere
That simply reeks with gas
And I trust you’ll pardon if I just
Stay and sit on my ass

The original implication of “classy,” as suggested by Berlin, seems to be “acting as one would if one were in the upper class.” But no one (or, at least, no one outside of a Fred Astaire movie) believes that the upper class consists of principled ladies and gentlemen wary of greed and determined to do the decent thing, even at their own expense. The Mellons and Astors and Vanderbilts didn’t get unimaginably wealthy by respecting labor unions and paying a decent wage. And today’s millionaires multi-millionaires billionaires are even worse.

Every day in every way, we’re learning that not only are the very rich not necessarily good people, they’re very often absolutely shitty people—oligarchs, fascists, and mortal enemies of our democracy. In the first Gilded Age, at least the swells displayed a little fucking noblesse oblige, evincing respect for the national culture and future generations by founding museums, libraries, and universities. Today’s one percent are their forebears’ Bizarro World opposites, hoarding wealth, plotting the dissolution of the nation itself, and promoting policies that will present future generations (if there are any) with a barely-livable planet.

Are there exceptions? Of course. We take note of them because they’re exceptions.

So the meaning of “classy” has evolved, from “displaying aristocratic qualities” to “rejecting aristocratic imperatives.” And that brings us (alas) back to Donald Trump.

Trump has spent a lifetime, if not trying to be classy, at least trying to look classy in the, uh, classic sense—i.e., like upper-class nobility, if only in its American version. He almost certainly thinks being it and looking it are the same thing. Hence the flaunting of the lavish residences, the gilt, the marble, the chandeliers. (You’re thinking, as we’re thinking, “…and the gold toilet,” but it’s unclear if he really owns one.)

But, as even plain old middle-class people like us know, the more you strive to imitate something like that, the more you reveal yourself for the social-climbing fake that you are. It’s possible that Trump, who is either the least self-aware person in the world, or the least concerned by what his self-awareness discloses, knows this. He spent decades trying, as it were, to move socially from Queens to Manhattan, to be accepted by the bigshots and celebs of New York high society as one of them, instead of being rejected for being what he was—the fuckup bridge-and-tunnel son of a racist developer of cheesy little houses, an inveterate liar and cheat, a purveyor of vulgarity, and a crap businessman.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

So now he’s wreaking revenge on the world—taking over the Kennedy Center, tarting up the White House with kitsch, attacking universities, wrecking our alliances, aligning with Putin (who might very well own him), subverting the economy, destroying America itself. Of course, he could afford to display real class and classiness, at least in the more contemporary sense. But that would entail rejecting greed and performing generous acts for other people, sometimes at his own expense. And he can no more do that than he can flap his arms and fly off to Shangri-La.

And so we—you, us, the American people, the world, the human race—are stuck with a President of the United States who is the very embodiment of un-classiness: of avarice, selfishness, narcissism, and cruelty. One is almost—or almost almost—tempted to say, “Come back, J.P. Morgan. All is forgiven.” In any case, here is another version of Splitsville, our metaphor or symbol or whatever the hell it is for two nations co-existing within one geo-political boundary: One nation consists of tens of millions of people who either are unaware of, or tolerate, or approve of, Trump’s monstrous lack of class. The other is the rest of us.

Hey, you! Yes, you! Getta loada this:

This is the cover of the actual analog book version of The Split. It will be available for sale soon. When it is, you will be informed, and expected to purchase a minimum of 14,000 copies of it. So prepare yourself mentally, spiritually, and financially.