The Death of the Yuppie. (Finally.)
Our affluent suburbs also bear the imprint. Drive around places like the Main Line and Moorestown and Blue Bell today and you’ll see the McMansions and yoga studios and Whole Foods that plainly announce: Yuppies sleep here.
Is this bad? On the contrary. Center City 2009 is far more appealing than the dank downtown of 1985, and if you offered me a choice of living in Wilkes-Barre (where it’s still sort of 1985) or among the swells of Wayne, it wouldn’t take me long to pick. That said, it’s worth pointing out that big chunks of Philadelphia are in worse shape now than they were in 1983. I guess that’s the thing about yuppieness — it remains pleasant and alluring even as it leaves tiny dark marks on your soul.
BY RIGHTS, YUPPIEDOM, even here, should have perished on 9/11, and for a moment, it looked as if it might. In my own mind, three memories stand out from those days. The first was having, for the only time in my adult life, a real sense of physical fear. I vividly remember walking out of my office building a few hours after the planes hit, spooked and looking skyward, wondering if something else, something worse, was headed our way. Then came a sense of rage, a willingness to be issued an M16 and shipped off to wherever Donald Rumsfeld wanted me shipped off to. Finally, there was an uncharacteristic (at least for my generation) sense of earnestness. A few nights after 9/11, my wife and I stood in front of our house in Wynnewood, holding candles alongside our neighbors, not a smart-alecky or self-aware comment to be heard anywhere. As Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter famously proclaimed, “I think it’s the end of the age of irony.”
And then we were asked to go shopping.
George Bush has been bashed repeatedly for this — although from a policy perspective, urging people to go out and spend was exactly the right prescription for an economy deeply jarred by the terrorist attacks. But what Bush missed so badly was the national mood. Numerous commentators echoed Graydon Carter in the weeks after 9/11, proclaiming that “nothing will ever be the same.” This now seems less an observation than a wish — a desire to do something among a generation that had never been asked to do anything for anyone other than itself. Alas, the only thing most of us were asked to do was take off our shoes and wait in longer lines at the airport (though given the eternity it takes to get off the ground in Philadelphia, this could be viewed as a Churchillian sacrifice).
