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Title : The Mnuchin Paradox
link : The Mnuchin Paradox
The Mnuchin Paradox
My parents sent me to private school in first grade for one reason and one reason only: They wanted me to learn.
They felt I couldn't or wouldn't do that in the pre-gentrified New York City public school system, with its cinder block walls and overcrowded classrooms and middling standards of achievement. I was hyperactive and defiant and restless. I wouldn't sit still. I would fall through the cracks.
They could afford (not easily) to send me to a school that would teach me how to deconstruct Shakespeare and weld stained glass and write a term paper in French and conduct chemistry experiments with shiny new lab equipment.
This was no Harvard tuition then, as it is now; but it was still a hefty chunk of change for a book editor and a public health physician to part with.
I could not have wandered the manicured lawns of Riverdale Country School had my mother stayed home in bed on Park Avenue or in her "country house," as many of the bejeweled wives of finance tycoons and surgeons seemed to do. A working mother at RCS in the 80s and even early 90s was an anomaly--a curiosity almost to be pitied.
I tried to win the approval of their children, which sometimes briefly worked but never lasted, because the metrics for valued human connection here were measured mostly in dollars, something my parents naively failed to anticipate in enrolling me there.
My self-esteem diminished but regained some traction as I gratefully gravitated toward classmates of more modest means. Other apartment-dwelling only children from my neighborhood whose parents were making a hefty financial investment in their children's education. Children of color, first generation kids from immigrant families who were vessels for their parents' hopes and faith in the American Dream. Kids whose sheer drive and intellect and hard work had earned them tuition-free access to this academic paradise and all the doors it unlocked amid the elms of Ivy League colleges and the limitless world beyond.
By early high school, I'd given up completely on trying to ingratiate myself with the rich and famous who drove BMWs at 90 miles an hour up the West Side Highway to school each morning or who were deposited there in private town cars with tinted windows.
I cultivated a genuine indifference to the lavish weekend parties in nightclubs and cavernous apartments, bereft of responsible adults and attended by notorious rich kids from other private schools around the city who smoked cigarettes and had sex in the shower.
Ironically, my indifference led to new uneasy kinships with some of the kids who had perhaps on some level begun to mature and to question the value of their own popularity.
I put my head down and studied hard and played sports. I dutifully gained early admission to an Ivy League School, the plan all along and the only reason I had tolerated this place: for my parents' goals and for my own. If there'd ever been any daylight between the two, I couldn't see it. My classmates chose me (me?!) to speak at graduation?! My college-aged boyfriend whom I loved from the west coast was there to see me walk across the stage.
These boys with their smooth cologned faces and floppy hair and Ralph Lauren button down shirts thought they were too good and too cool for me? What a joke. No. FUCK that noise. I was too cool for them. I dated men, not boys. I didn't want them and I certainly didn't need them, and the feeling could not have been more mutual.
I knew I would finish college and bide my time until I could escape this world and I did. I wanted to be somewhere where no one cared about your income or your academic pedigree. Most of all, I wanted to spare my own kids the indignity of trying to maintain material standards that I was perhaps able--but would never be willing--to help them meet. Standards which, at the time, RCS couldn't help but encourage.
The adults there didn't meaningfully interfere with bullying or the social Darwinism that characterized every brush in the hallways. None of this "whole child" building "empathy" and "community," as seems to be in vogue at such places now.
I had no feelings for this place then, and I certainly don't have any now. I was (and am) grateful for the education I received there for education's own sake, and to the wonderful teachers and coaches who gave it to me.
That's it. Full stop. End of story. En fin. Exeunt.
So I sort of raised a brow when I saw on Facebook and then read in the New York Times that former students of the school had written to Steve Mnuchin, Trump's treasury secretary and husband to vacuous she-demon Louise Linton, who berated a working class Oregon mom on Instagram while flying to her honeymoon on a government plane.
The letter, like the one from his Yale classmates, implored their fellow alum to condemn white supremacy and resign from his post.
I admire the spirit of this letter and the good intentions of the 185 people who'd signed it, some of them friends of mine. But the idea that "equity, social justice, and doing the right thing" were somehow endemic values of RCS--especially in the uber-materialistic 1980s when Steve Mnuchin went there--is a bit daft.
Because we shouldn't kid ourselves.
Money--having it, making it, and keeping it--was, is, and always will be a top value of these elite prep schools, including RCS.
That's why Steve Mnuchin is in the White House. To make money as much money as possible, as quickly as possible, for rich people like himself. To perpetuate the corporate-owned shell of a democracy we now have and will continue to have unless and until we are honest about income inequality and the havoc that a slavish devotion to free market capitalism has wrought over the past 40 years, up to and including a generation of prescription heroin addicts and a burning, drowning planet.
So we can plead with Steve Mnuchin all we want, but shaming him over his silence about Charlottesville is futile. It's a "distraction," he said. Of course it is.
It's a distraction from the only thing that matters and the only thing that ever mattered. And let's not pretend he didn't learn it in school.
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