The Omnivorous Y

The time has come for this column to face, foursquare and without flinching, the question of Yuppie culture. It must be faced because it is not going away. And it is not getting better. It's just getting older. Like that smelly cheese they eat.

Actually the durability of Y-culture has been self-evident for years. At least since the honorable grunts of Hill Street Blues, public servants one and all, faded into rerun land and the pampered, overpaid, paper-pushing, private-sector professionals of LA Law took center stage. And this column has circled around the subject for almost that long, usually with one sentence write-offs like the one above. But this column must now face its natural adversary because this columnist is finally forced to.

For 10 years I successfully dodged and ducked the realm of Y-hegemony. It wasn't that hard actually. Y-people make a lot of noise and consume a lot of airtime and ink, but their geography is pretty limited. It was especially easy in Washington, D.C. I knew the turf. If you stayed east of 16th Street NW and north of Florida Avenue you'd usually miss them. And they never went anywhere in Prince George's County, Maryland.

But a year ago I lost my home-court advantage, and now, through no fault of my own, I promise, this column issues forth from an address painfully near to one of the Y-culture capitals of late-capitalist, post-industrial, post-modern, post-decadent America.

I'm not going to print directions to our apartment in this magazine. But let's just say that we live on a depressingly quiet, astonishingly childless, Saab-lined little street in the shadow of America's most famous university. Being without any organic ties to, or much understanding of, the indigenous "real people" cultures of this city, it is in these semi-Arctic climes that I've finally experienced Y-culture full force.

In fact, Y-hegemony may be more powerful in the Boston area than it is anywhere else on the face of the earth. This is true for two not unrelated infrastructural reasons. First, there is the area's unnatural confluence of elite colleges and universities. This in turn gave rise to its economic status as a high-tech, information-age Silicon Valley East, which, for a while there, could soak up bright, ambitious, acquisitive college graduates as fast as those elite institutions could spew them out. Then, atop this techno-demographic base, local Y-culture has also been able to draw on the centuries-old local Yankee elite traditions of smug superiority and intellectual arrogance.

The bottom line is that New England Y-culture tends toward conspicuous displays of "intelligence" where other regional variants might favor power plays or raw consumption. Which is not to say that pointy-headed Y's don't consume. Their consumption is defined by the universal Y-refrain of "quality." You never buy a $2 jar of mustard just to prove that you can afford it. It's always a matter of "quality."

Another Y-universal is, of course, the narcissistic health obsession. In fact it was the "health thing" that first caused me to notice that The Boston Globe is little more than a Y-culture bulletin board. It dawned on me when, for about the third time in a week, I read another first-person-omniscient mention of the devotion to health and exercise that "WE" share here in America.

I happen to know for a fact that "we" don't share that obsession, because I don't. And simple observation, and common sense, tell me that most of the folks in black and Hispanic Roxbury, or working-class South Boston, aren't spending too much time at "The Club" either.

IT'S THE ASSUMPTION THAT "Us" is them that is most maddening about Y-culture, and most seductive. The best breakdown I've encountered on that subject came in a recent commentary by Carmen Delzell on "All Things Considered," of all places. In the piece in question Delzell was describing her semi-forced defection back to America (i.e., Baltimore) from the leafy cappuccino bars of Connecticut Avenue (west of 16th Street), in Washington, D.C. She described the move as an experience of regaining a lost self.

Delzell described the creeping alienation of self from the self that she experienced while living in the belly of Yuppie culture, but without the Y-people's overinflated incomes. You can almost start to think you're one of them, was the gist of her message.

At first you just share a few of their "quality"-oriented cultural preferences, maybe foreign films or Cajun food. But then you grow accustomed to their comfortable milieu. In isolation from all alternatives, you begin to absorb more of their tastes. You eat their food and drink their drinks. You read their magazines and go to their theaters.

In short you begin to be swallowed up by that omniscient and omnivorous "we." You may even start to think that you really are one of them. But then your rent-controlled apartment goes condo. Or you get sick. And that's when you're reminded that, praise the Lord, you really do have more in common with the low-budget, low-class, low-pretension folks at K-Mart.

Of course, by then, for most of us, it's too late to reconstruct a class identity that corresponds to economic reality. And people bereft of cultural identity are also politically powerless. Which is why Y-cultural hegemony is about a lot more than natural fabrics and fresh-ground coffee.

Danny Duncan Collum is a Sojourners contributing editor.