When We Were All Democrats

continued from D.C. as Theater

I had no beef with John from suburban Maryland as my roommate. I would gladly have spent my entire time at Xavier sharing a room with him. But circumstances outside my own doing conspired to rearrange the room pairings on the first floor, which were supposedly set in stone.

It began with the conflict between Pat, who was in the room next to mine, and his own roommate, who was the other Andy on our floor.

Besides Andy B., Pat was the best friend I would wind up making at Georgetown. Looking back at my life, and thinking about the incredible good luck I've had in meeting people, and yet appreciating it so little at the time, the short list of people that comes to mind definitely includes Pat.

Pat was from Philadelphia. He was tall, melancholic in temperament, yet radiating inclusive warmth in his big grin and loose posture. Somewhat out of step with the era, he had a modish mob of dark blond hair like a punk rocker. He had a keen, well-read sense of humor that was merciless in mocking the things he didn't like. He could erupt into tight-lipped giggle at a clever pun, the exchanging of which was one of his favorite hobbies.

He grew up in the western suburbs of Philly and had gone to an expensive private day school. His father was a banker who worked in a high rise in downtown Philadelphia. I was astounded when I heard Pat had driven his own car---a gold-orange 1970s Trans-Am---down from his home to Washington and had parked in on the street nearby. In the 1980s, having your own car as a young person was not as universal as it would become later. Georgetown had all but forbidden freshman and other students living in the dorm from bringing their vehicles. It would be a difficult, expensive thing to do, to pay for parking, and obtain the proper permits, which would not be granted to students in dorms. Pat had casually broken the rules right from the beginning in a way that I would never have considered.

Yet there was not an ounce of class pretension in him. The fact that I was a small-town kid from Colorado on a need-based scholarship never entered into any calculus of our friendship. In the early Eighties, the very idea that class---money-based class, at least---should determine one's preference for friends and companions was out of fashion in a big way. Movies and pop culture reflected the idea that being from the "upper class" was typically a detriment to one's character, one that one had to overcome in order to become fully American. Class snobbery had been thrown out---at least temporarily. At least that was the idea.

Having suffered through the Sixties, the Vietnam War, and all the debacles of the 1970s, everyone knew the Establishment was incompetent.   In pop culture, the old upper class was depicted as decrepit and impotent. Having that as your background meant you might be too out-of-touch to understand that wisdom and virtue in America did not trickle down but bubbled up from the common people. The fact that Pat had gone to a private day school did not at all fill me with envy, or make me feel as if I had gotten any less of a good high school education. I would proudly have stacked good old FCHS up against any school in the nation. Looking back, I realize how my personal conviction of this ultra-democratic equality among us arose from the particular high school I attended, at the particular time I did, and even the clique of people I knew there---a tiny island in a tiny window of history, that was more fleeting than I could have realized. In my own way, I was just as much a snob as anyone else.

That is not to say I didn't feel intimidation and alienation at Georgetown. I certainly did. But it wasn't because I thought people wouldn't like me or accept me because of my humble, democratic background. That never entered my mind. I was equal to them in that way, I knew.

Oddly too, while all this was playing out in our culture, everyone was trying to rebuild the shattered upper class, but in an irreverent, philistine way through bootstrap yuppiedom and the trappings of "achievement." Reagan was seen as having brought back glitzy upper class attitudes to the White House after the too-humble woe-is-me Jimmy Carter, but in reality Reagan was a small town midwesterner who had worked his way up to being a Hollywood movie star. For all his faults, he was a natural democrat, a party-crasher of the elite, a fact that made him more detestable to us liberals because he had defected to the other side. He wasn't a natural white shoe, school-blazer-with-coat-of-arms guy like George Bush, who was the icon of that order that we thought had died and was buried with the Sixties.

How little we all knew, of course, but for the moment, in the wake of the cultural demolition of the 1970s, and the confusing, almost post-apocalyptic cultural zeitgeist that had ensued in the early 1980s, the idea that held currency among us was that America had somehow undergone a grand reset. At least for youth, we thought, no one had any huge advantage over anyone else. Sure money got you far, and everyone wanted their share of it, but among the kids, everyone wore versions of the same clothes---you could pick your identity that way---and had grown up watching the same television programs. Ancient barriers had crumbled down, even in the Ivy League, and no one was manning the gates anymore. Talented interlopers were welcome. Anyone with enough chutzpah could walk in and claim the right to be a part of the new order. And many of us were determined to do just that.