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Lakewood Cemetery, situated between Lake Calhoun and Lake Harriet in South Minneapolis, is a place of big lawns and grand monuments. It is one of the city’s fanciest and most meticulously maintained community spaces. Indeed, it holds the graves of some of our state’s most prestigious former citizens, including Hubert Horatio Humphrey, Paul and Sheila Wellstone, Les Kouba, and Tiny Tim, among a whole lot of Washburns, Pillsburys, and others.

But it’s also the site of a little-known though equally inspiring local treasure: the domed and tiled Lakewood Memorial Chapel. Completed in 1910, it is described by some as the “most perfect example of Byzantine mosaic art in the United States.”

Now, a person can’t just trot up the steps and sashay inside. That would be rather too casual for Lakewood. Instead, visitors must stop by the office near the cemetery’s front gates and ask permission. A member of the staff, friendlier and more obliging than you might expect, then calls over to the crematory, located beneath the chapel, and somebody trudges up the stairs to unlock the door and flip on the lights. And there you are, alone in one of the most gorgeous interiors in Minneapolis.

The walls and ceilings appear to be made of light and color. Every square inch of them. And they are, in fact, adorned with more than ten million fingernail-sized tesserae: shards of marble, colored stone, and glass fused with gold and silver. This is the kind of place that once made people fall to their knees, mistaking beauty for God. Except that here, the symbolism is more earthy and less partisan than you’d find in a church, synagogue, or mosque. Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed make no appearances.

One alcove features a row of olive trees, known for their legendary healing properties; differently hued leaves represent the various stages of life. In each corner of the chapel’s largest room, female figures represent each of the four virtues—Love, Hope, Faith, and Memory. Even the shadows of their flowing robes are intricately rendered in tiles, as are their mood-appropriate expressions; Love looks straight ahead, Hope gazes upward, Faith looks off to the side, and Memory peers downward, hand to cheek. She seems a bit forlorn, as Memory should.

The chapel was planned at the turn of the century by Minnesota architect Harry Wild Jones and New York designer Charles R. Lamb, in order that Lakewood, founded in 1871, should have a suitable site for funerals. The exterior is modeled on the Haghia Sophia, the domed church built in the sixth century by Emperor Justinian in what is now Istanbul. The interior is inspired by Venice’s ornate San Marco Cathedral. In fact, when it came time to create the mosaics, Lamb traveled to Rome and hired six of Italy’s finest tile artists—they’d just completed a project in the Vatican. In Venice, they crafted the tesserae by hand, attached them to gummed cloth, and shipped them to Minneapolis. Then, in 1909, the artists arrived in person to assemble the chapel’s interior mosaics.

As you sit on one of the dozen or so wooden benches, your eye is drawn upward, into the dome. Here, your deepest and most churlish thoughts are captured by the butterfly wings of twelve gilded angels who wear brilliantly colored garlands, gowns, and halos. The intricacy of the ceiling makes it seem infinite; it reminds me of trying to count stars on a black country night. Encircling the dome are twenty-four stained-glass windows, which throw a soft glow on the angels. They also serve as a sundial, telling astute observers not only the time, but also the time of year.

It is a remarkable feat, an ingenious creation that mingles layers of meaning with stunning visual appeal. It leaves one feeling both contemplative and inspired, but not the least bit oppressed. Yet, strangely, sadly, hardly anybody ever sees this chapel, except at funerals for the city’s favored sons and daughters. “If this chapel were somewhere in Europe, thousands of Americans would visit it each year,” wrote a rhapsodic journalist in 1931. “Never have we seen anything to equal it in this country.”—Jennifer Vogel

One of the upsides of not being a serious athlete is that you can feel a little less guilty about smoking and drinking with impunity. But you can always count on certain subcultural elements to contradict even that plain truth. Bike couriers, for example. They seem to take special pleasure in doing everything, well, extreme. While a credible courier would never use that word (uncool), there is no other that adequately describes the lifestyle. A fifty-mile ride on a single-speed bike without brakes; a twelve of Pabst; a pack of American Spirits. These are core competencies.

“I don’t want to work in a box breathing recycled air. And I don’t want to drive in a box to get to that box,” said Christian Klempp the other day. He was summing up why he’s been sweating it as a Minneapolis bicycle courier and “alley cat” bike racer for the past eight years. When Klempp isn’t spinning across town with legal or architectural documents for the messenger company he co-owns, he is planning Minneapolis’s biggest alley-cat event, the Stupor Bowl.

These races are the unofficial sport of messengers everywhere: part athletic feat, part scavenger hunt, and—for those seeking the overall Stupor Bowl title—part drinking game. The eighth annual bowl is slated for the wintry Saturday of the big football game, February 5, and the hometown team always hopes for the worst possible weather. “Couriers come from all over, and we want them to see the conditions we have to work in,” said Klempp.

A large number of these courier-contestants, along with being game for your surreptitious Sno-Ball and malt liquor ingesting competition, are also smokers. Fred Eisenberey, an eighteen-year courier veteran and smoker, said “probably forty percent” of his colleagues are puffers. “It’s significantly higher than the general population.” Any random day outside Nicollet Mall’s Dunn Brothers coffee shop gives visual confirmation that these everyday athletes light up in high numbers.

In fact, the numbers were high enough to entice Canadian cigarette maker Dunhill to sponsor the Vancouver alley cat known as the Human Powered Rollercoaster in the mid-nineties. “The registration packet even included a pack of Dunhill cigarettes,” said Klempp, reminiscing about the days when tobacco manufacturers could still sponsor sporting events without shame.
Though Eisenberey concedes that smoking is part of the rebel image of the bike-messenger industry, he wishes he’d never started. He has been rolling his own for the past quarter-decade in an effort to avoid toxic glues and additives. Still, he bristles at any suggestion that he kick the habit. “Minnesota is such a ‘mommy state,’ where absolutely nothing is allowed. I mean, it took someone like Jesse Ventura to finally let us play with sparklers. Everyone here knows what is better for me, but I don’t think smoking has slowed me down much.”

It would seem that Eisenberey hasn’t been taking it slow at all. In addition to bicycling all day and in all weather, he is an active underwater hockey player and snorkeler. “I have an above-average lung capacity and always have. I’m known for spending a lot of time on the bottom of the pool. I really don’t think smoking has been as harmful to me as overeating or drinking too much.”
Smoking is not a pastime shared by many other athletes. Jay, a half-pack-a-day smoker who wished to be identified only by his first name, holds an impressive 3:14 time in the Twin Cities Marathon and doesn’t see other long-distance runners smoking at events. “It is not really the venue or location to smoke. The two activities do not go hand in hand, for obvious reasons.” Still, he occasionally lights up while waiting in line to get his race bib, just for the sadistic pleasure of seeing fellow racers clear a wide and outraged berth. “It’s obvious” that his times would be better if he never smoked, he says. But what isn’t so clear is the effect of all that healthy cardiovascular exercise on a serious smoker. Is it possible that all that vigorous exercise could somehow reverse the ill effects of continued smoking? In other words, could one cancel out the other?w

Dr. Mark Johns, a physician at St. Mary’s in Duluth, said, “I am not aware of any studies that directly address this question; however, it is interesting to note that there is data to support the use of pulmonary rehab in patients with emphysema.” While the research work from the American Thoracic Society does not indicate a survival benefit for smokers who exercise, it does show promise for an improved quality of life. So what does this mean to jocks who do indulge in smokes? Dr. Johns interpreted the data like this: “You’ll die just as soon. But hey, you’ll be happier until that day comes.”—Lucie Amundsen

It’s February, and if you aren’t carbo-loading for the Birkebeiner, then you could be carbo-loading on behalf of your local public broadcaster. Can it be long before the next round of pledge drives hits the airwaves? The last time this happened, I volunteered all over town to sample the culture and the carbohydrates.

First I went to KFAI, the little community radio station on the West Bank, where I sometimes have a show. When I arrived, another woman and a man (not a couple, forty-something) were already there to volunteer. They wore jeans and sweaters. It was early on a weekday morning so, naturally, I was still in my pajamas. No one seemed to mind. With its natural light and the smell of good, strong coffee, KFAI’s war room was a lot like my neighborhood coffee shop; there were books of poetry (written by an on-air host) for volunteers to take home. There was one small card table, and all three of us sat around it, talking about films, restaurants, and the changing Twin Cities scene. And we answered the phone. Between calls, we’d eat bagels and homemade coffee cake. My best call came from a woman at a violin repair shop, who can’t receive KFAI’s signal unless she turns off the lights. One of my two fellow volunteers said she was having such a good time that she planned to come back next week.

Next up: Minnesota Public Radio. On this weekday morning, there were maybe twenty volunteers. The youngest looked to be about thirty, and more than a few were probably in their seventies. A few of us wore grubby jeans, but most dressed in workplace casual. MPR’s vibe is very office-like. We started with a twenty-minute presentation on filling out pledge forms, conducted by a woman using a pointer. After the lecture, we filed into a room with one window and about thirty cubicles—stopping first for food. The spread was strictly breakfast-meeting: bagels, pastries, fruit, and coffee, although I was happy to see I didn’t have to use non-dairy creamer. I found a cubicle and struck up a conversation with my neighbor, a freelance classical musician who’s been volunteering at MPR for years. He remembered taking pledges sitting at a table in the hall and said, “Cubicles are much better,” which is something I never thought I’d hear someone say. Like me, he must need a fix of office life every once in a while. In fact, I found myself longing nostalgically for happy hour, with free nachos and all the chicken wings I could eat after a long day driving the mouse.

Meanwhile, I talked with my neighbor about skiing and I answered the phone. I took a call from a man making a sizeable pledge in memory of his stepson, who was murdered in St. Paul. I got up to check out the freebies, mostly books on financial planning. “‘Sound Money’ must have weeded out their library,” my neighbor said when I came back with a book on retirement options.

My last stop was Twin Cities Public Television. It was a Saturday night, and I felt a little out of place in a group of about forty people, mostly in their sixties and seventies, wearing pressed slacks and pressed sweaters. I even spotted my first Christmas sweater of the 2004 holiday season. Since we were seated at two long tables and could talk only to our immediate neighbors, answering phones at TPT was a lot like those dinners with relatives I see only once a year. The conversation focused on the weather, winter driving, the shortage of flu shots, and local television personalities. Unlike a family dinner, everyone at the table could simultaneously surf the web and talk on the phone. My best call was from a woman who worried that her premium might include the disco ball clearly visible on that evening’s programming. I was able to talk her down from this harrowing emotional ledge.

When it was time for food at TPT, I have to admit that I expected green bean casserole and Jell-O salad. But the spread was totally slumber-party: pizza, ice cream, and popcorn. The staff contributed to the family-room atmosphere, drawing names out of a hat for the freebies. A woman next to me got a Sesame Street T-shirt, which she traded with her neighbor for a video of a Sarah Brightman special. They were both happy.
—Maria Rubinstein

In the past three weeks, I’ve been browsed 253 times, though I wonder if that number includes the twice-daily peek I take at my own profile, like a quick glance in the mirror as I pass by. Tickle.com first lured me to its domain with a promise to rate my intelligence. While other indicators have given me a good read on my own mental candlepower (solid annual report cards, successfully playing along with Jeopardy!, a decent employment exam at Outback Steakhouse), recent unspectacular GRE results had left me wounded. Forty multiple-choice clicks later, I was back up there where I belong, “extremely higher than average.” I was identified as a “facts curator” in the company of geniuses like Bill Gates. My self-esteem in good repair, I got briefly addicted and dug up every other Tickle quiz I could find: the “Ultimate Personality Test” (Observer—kind-hearted, intuitive, good mediator); the “Values Test” (Loyal Rebel—honors relationships and truth-telling); the “What Breed of Dog are You?” test (Chihuahua—energetic, devoted, and passionate). I ended my binge of self-love with the “Confidence Test” (Your Confidence Level is High!)

Tickle founder James Currier said the idea for his website came to him in a 1998 Harvard Business School class. After he and his peers took a career personality test, he noticed a dramatic improvement in their interpersonal relationships. “Everyone is interested in themselves,” he said. Perhaps it is true that you must first love yourself before you can love others.

Tickle’s quizzes are divided into “Fun tests” (Who’s your TV Family? How Hip are You?) and “Ph.D. Premium” tests. The latter deal with serious topics like “Relationship,” “Career,” and “Personality.” Tickle claims that these little exams are “Ph.D.-certified.” By this, they mean they are “the highest-quality and most-scientific tests available on the Internet, meeting standards on par with the academic world,” said a Tickle spokeswoman named Christy Albright. “Each test takes five to ten months to design, construct, validate, and launch.” If a solid record of profitability and a recent ninety-four-million-dollar acquisition by Monster.com are any indication, Tickle is doing something right. While the site gives away teaser test results, it makes bank through in-depth Ph.D. analyses, a plethora of pop-ups, and emailing priveleges in the “Matchmaking” domain, which I succumbed to in order to contact a certain blond jokester.

Ty Tashiro, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota, is skeptical of Tickle’s methods and claims. “Most licensed psychologists would question the ethics of giving psychological feedback with no expert around to explain or work with the results,” he said. He would say that. Still, this may explain Tickle’s consistently positive feedback, which, in my experience, is not at all “on par with the academic world.” At best, Tickle provides keen insight into the human psyche; at worst, it is a high-tech fortune cookie.

After my last real-world relationship dissolved, I leapt from Tickle’s self-indulgent quizzes to its “Matchmaking” area. Time to move beyond self-love. The good news was, I could take my test results with me. I created a profile and filled out the TrueMatch questionnaire, well on my way to discovering love matches. Searching my digital archives, I found just the right photo to present myself as attractive, charming, and hip. It would be my passport to love.

While getting acquainted with the bells and whistles on Tickle’s matchmaking service, I requested a Chemistry Report with myself. I was greeted with the headline, “Will tdapra and tdapra sizzle or fizzle?” There was my photograph, posted twice, side by side, each over-the-shoulder gaze looking out through the computer screen with a mix of intrigue and playfulness. I looked like a pair of sassy identical twins. According to Tickle,

What will make you sizzle:
Feeling safe and comfortable
Frequent relationship check-ins
Someone’s who’s interested in making
the relationship unique
Someone’s who’s equally excited by the
world around you

What will make you fizzle:
Getting too comfortable in a rut (We have
been watching a lot of “Everybody Loves Raymond” reruns.)
Your partner needing to check in on feelings
a lot (We thought this was a good thing!)
Getting confused about who does what in
the relationship (Yes, this could be a problem with us.)
Butting heads (There’s that Loyal Rebel factor.)

Over the next couple of weeks, I exchanged emails with a half-dozen guys (for a monthly fee of $19.95) and met one for coffee. While passing notes with electronic admirers gave me something to look forward to while checking my in-box, meeting in person proved to be less than spectacular. After my first cup-of-something-warm encounter, I returned home, ever so glad to be back in the company of myself (“feeling safe and comfortable”). I turned on my computer and immediately checked my email for more potential love matches. When I browsed my list of Tickle favorites, I caught a glimpse of my photo and noticed the little orange fuel gauge above it at full capacity. “Compatibility rating: 100%.” I clicked on “Chat with me,” and a laughing blue box popped up. “Unfortunately,” it read, “you cannot chat with yourself.”—Tara DaPra

With its cast of starving poets and musicians and creative squatters, Puccini’s La Bohème has not only inspired generations of bohemians; some would say it’s the best known and most accessible opera in the canon. When someone goes to the opera for the first time, frequently it’s to see La Bohème. It has also been the touchstone for many hip, latter-day shows, such as Rent and Moulin Rouge. Yet a modern-day Rodolfo who showed up in hopes of cadging a rush ticket to the Minnesota Opera’s recent production would have been disappointed; the entire run was sold out to business suits and little black cocktail dresses.

So it is with perhaps a little romantic vengeance that one should anticipate Theatre Latté Da’s intimate production of La Bohème, opening later this month. It will feature a stripped-down, hot-rod cast and a small musical troupe, instead of the typical hullaballoo. This Bohème comes on the heels of many other tiny opera productions that have been staged recently, a trend spearheaded by Theatre de la Jeune Lune and the North Star Opera Company.

Traditionalists often cringe when smaller, underfunded arts organizations go capering with Rossini, Stravinsky, and the like. There are good reasons to worry. These shows minimize ensemble singers, reduce orchestrations for a small band or piano quintet, and they often cast a singer or two who can’t hit the score’s original key. In other words, the producers of these operas are saving money and passing those savings along to you. Tickets to see these shows are in the ballpark of fifteen to thirty dollars, a relative bargain.

In the case of Theatre Latté Da, it’s taking some bold liberties with the world’s best-known opera. Although the company has kept the score and libretto intact, and all singing will be in the original key, artistic director Peter Rothstein is tearing La Bohème from its 1830s roots and planting it in the 1930s—still in Paris, still in the Latin Quarter apartment of some starving artists, but this time on the eve of Nazi occupation. “I think La Bohème is rooted in a specific place but not a specific time,” said Rothstein. “I wanted to put the show in a world that heightens its theme of loss of innocence.”

Minus the usual orchestra and large ensemble of singers, Rothstein’s production amplifies the story’s darker elements. “It’s difficult to find a character’s vulnerability when there’s an eighty-piece orchestra playing below them,” said Rothstein. The real trick in transferring Bohème to the 1930s was to orchestrate the score for guitar, piano, violin, clarinet, flute, and—mon dieu!—accordion. In other words, the full complement of Parisian street and café instruments.

“It’s going to sound extraordinarily different,” said Joe Schlefke, who, as music director on the project, is the guy responsible for introducing an accordion to Puccini. “But it’s not sacrilege. We’re trying to be respectful of the whole piece.” As it is written, La Boheme’s characters—Mimi, Rodolpho, Colline, and the rest—are all in their twenties, but the show’s vocal demands usually require well-seasoned singers in their forties or fifties. The dimensions of the 130-seat Loring Playhouse Theater loosen those restrictions, allowing Latté Da to cast age-appropriately (read: cheap grad-student talent). “Our singers aren’t made for big houses,” said Schlefke, who gets to add whispers and other subtleties that wouldn’t play well in the 1,900-seat Ordway. Besides, said Rothstein, “Mimi dies of consumption. You can’t believe that when she weighs two-twenty.”—Christy DeSmith

Here’s something we never thought we’d say: We were very sad to hear about the end of traffic reports on the radio. Public radio station KBEM, which is owned and operated by Minneapolis Public Schools, was on the receiving end of a pink slip issued by the Minnesota Department of Transportation when the new year dawned. With MnDOT canceling its fifteen-year relationship, KBEM will lose nearly half of its operating budget. It’s unclear whether one of the country’s last, best jazz stations can continue—though we hear it is accepting your redoubled financial contributions as a matter of emergency life support.

It was a happy marriage, or at least it seemed to be. We never heard KBEM and MnDOT argue. They were always respectful of each other, even if occasionally there were long, embarrassing silences. At a time when everyone agrees that transportation is one of the biggest challenges facing the state, MnDOT’s decision is breathtaking in its boldness, and could reverberate down to the next statewide election. After all, through KBEM, MnDOT was the state’s most visible (audible) agency and office. It may be the only voice of local government the middle-class taxpayer ever heard.

The press release we received from MnDOT was a model of bureaucratic deflection. In its most telling lines, spokesman Kevin Gutknecht wrote, “access to travel information has grown markedly since MnDOT began its relationship with the station fifteen years ago. This fact contributed to the decision.” Gutknecht could probably use a lesson in cause and effect. If we understand him correctly, it is because the relationship worked so well that it must be ended.

It is silly to claim that KBEM has plenty of viable substitutes today. Commercial traffic radio is the biggest joke in all of broadcasting. A typical traffic report on, say, KQRS, consists of a ten-second advertisement for foot powder pronounced over the throb of a helicopter, cut with five seconds condemning the Bloomington Strip—a daily riddle that is about as surprising as sunset and moonrise.

We’re told we should now call 511 for up-to-the-minute traffic reports, or, alternatively, point our browser to 511.org. So far, we have been unimpressed with these second-string technologies, and given MnDOT’s motherly tut-tutting about safety on our highways, we wonder how it can, in good conscience, recommend using the phone or the laptop while we are driving. This will eventually convert the solution into the problem.

We have to admit, too, that we have grown fond of KBEM’s programming and how well it came to play in traffic. Fifteen years ago, “jazz and traffic radio” seemed like a miserable billing. But our cold hearts were melted, first by “Bluegrass Saturday Morning,” and then by the whole goofy package, from “Engines of Our Ingenuity” to “String Theory” to “Brisas Latinas.” Even in the midst of the most heinous violin jazz or harmonica fusion, we smiled when we heard the reports from Tuttle Elementary, which had achieved a kind of rumpus-room legend all their own. It is a terrible irony that there are now fewer than a dozen full-time stations in the nation dedicated to jazz, the most purely American art form, and that another one may bite the dust.

KBEM is not down and out, not yet, but neither are we sure what the road ahead looks like. If we had a spare half-million laying around the office, we’d be tempted to, you know, diversify our media holdings. But even in the best-case scenario for KBEM, the outlook is heartbreaking for anyone planning a sensible response to rush hour; it looks like we’re stuck with foot powder and the Bloomington Strip.

In 1899, the maverick economist Thorstein Veblen proposed a unified field theory of American civilization. In his savage and oracular masterpiece, The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen theorized that wasteful extravagance isn’t a mere byproduct of consumer capitalism, but its underlying rationale. After all, without gross displays of wealth—“conspicuous consumption” was Veblen’s memorable term—how do the rich differentiate themselves from the democratic rabble? In contemporary terms, a purse is a place to keep Kleenex; a twelve-thousand-dollar Louis Vuitton handbag is conspicuous consumption. A Honda Civic is an automobile; a thirty-seven-thousand-dollar Lexus RX SUV … you get the picture.

Given their obvious applicability to modern life, Veblen’s ideas about money and social class have never really gone out of fashion among progressive intellectuals. Lewis Mumford, for instance, compared Leisure Class to a stick of dynamite wrapped up to look like a stick of candy. John Kenneth Galbraith was a fan, as was Albert Einstein. Just this past December, a group of prominent thinkers, including Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham, held a symposium at New York’s New School for Social Research to discuss, in the Boston Globe’s words, how Veblen’s ideas might “help revive the Progressive tradition in the age of NASDAQ, branding, and bling-bling.”

Veblen’s progressive legacy is also the subject of the recent Thorstein Veblen and the American Way of Life, by Louis Patsouras, a history professor at Kent State University. “[W]hy did Veblen, from a relatively affluent immigrant family, who then scaled the heights of academia, become a socialist?” Patsouras writes. “Some tentative answers: His rapid upward social mobility reinforced his outsider immigrant awareness, undoubtedly heightened by his encounter in academia with the Yankee upper-class academic elite, the contrast and attendant tensions between his life situation and theirs being more than obvious.”

In other words, Veblen was not just a socialist—he was a perpetual misfit. While Thorstein Veblen and the American Way of Life is a primer on Veblen’s socialist tendencies, it’s rather a shame that it doesn’t include a biographical sketch of its subject, since Veblen was such an endearingly eccentric figure. A lazy, deeply disorderly man, he was caricatured by no less a snob than H.L. Mencken as “Prof. Dr.”—the stereotypical befuddled professor. As a teacher at the University of Chicago and Stanford University, Veblen delivered his lectures in an inaudible mumble. He was, according to his earliest biographer, Joseph Dorfman, an incurable philanderer who lost at least two academic jobs through his inability to keep his hands off his colleagues’ wives. He proposed making clothing out of paper. Also, Veblen hated dogs.

“He is the filthiest of the domestic animals in his person and the nastiest in his habits,” Veblen writes in a typically acidic passage from Leisure Class. “For this he makes up in a servile, fawning attitude toward his master, and a readiness to inflict damage and discomfort on all else. The dog, then, commends himself to our favor by affording play to our propensity for mastery.”

And he hated shaving: “There has of late years been some slight recrudescence of the shaven face in polite society.”

And sports: “The addiction to sports, therefore, in a peculiar degree marks an arrested development of the man’s moral nature.”

So how did a nice Norwegian boy from Minnesota turn into such a misanthrope—indeed, the most caustic grump of his age? In fact, the place where Veblen grew up, a modest farmstead just outside the southern Minnesota town of Nerstrand, may have had a great deal to do with the formation of his idiosyncratic views. The rural Midwest was, in Veblen’s time, awash in radical Populism. Only three years before the appearance of Leisure Class, William Jennings Bryant had delivered his famous “Cross of Gold” speech to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. And a few decades earlier, a Minnesota farmer had founded the Grange to fight against the moneyed interests of the Gilded Age. Veblen seems to have internalized certain aspects of his home state’s character: the ornery independent streak of sod-busting pioneers, along with a crippling sense of inferiority. The latter certainly had something to do with Veblen’s disdain for showy displays of wealth. One has to be pretty alienated, after all, to imagine, as Veblen did, that high society is nothing more than a grotesque masque.

Veblen regarded the rich as Charles Darwin regarded Galapagos tortoises: They were a faintly ridiculous foreign species lost in time. In Veblen’s view, the idle rich of the Gilded Age weren’t just ludicrous, they were less evolved. Their brand of laissez-faire capitalism, he argued, was a residue of our barbarian heritage. All the trappings of wealth were signifiers of antiquity; fancy clothes, servants, and racehorses merely replaced the warring and slave-owning that had distinguished the ruling elite in pre-civilized times. This tendency to define economic class in terms of taste in material goods Veblen called “invidious comparison.” Today, it is Lexus and Louis Vuitton that signify your standing. Veblen understood, though, that this distinction wasn’t expressed only in luxury goods; the barbarian elite also emulated the poor—the only other idle social class—by adopting their “archaically simple” tastes. This is especially true today in the retail marketplace. A French peasant pedestal creamer; shade-grown organic Angolan coffee; a climbing vacation in Nepal: All fit Veblen’s definition of “pecuniary emulation” because they mimic rustic simplicity while in fact costing an arm and a leg. To Veblen, these displays of wealth and waste amounted to a “symbolic pantomime.” The rich who indulged in this parade of uselessness were the evolutionary equivalent of extravagantly plumed flightless birds.

Not that you’d really get any of this from reading Thorstein Veblen and the American Way of Life, which, weirdly, is about neither Thorstein Veblen nor the American way of life. Rather, Patsouras spends the majority of his time broadly outlining the history of socialism—a worthy undertaking, perhaps, but one that sheds little light on Veblen or his ideas. And Patsouras’s scholarly authority is somewhat undercut by an embarrassment of misspellings and grammatical errors. Veblen, who pilloried academia for its lack of rigor and stultifying atmosphere, would not have approved.

Moreover, Patsouras’s program may be fundamentally flawed. What he’s attempting in Thorstein Veblen and the American Way of Life is, essentially, to draft Veblen for Team Marx. But while Veblen may have expressed sympathy for the Bolsheviks in Russia, saying he was a Marxist is sort of like claiming Jesus was a Republican. He seems far too much the intellectual iconoclast to go in for Marxism’s dogmatic pieties. Indeed, in 1906, Veblen even wrote that “the Marxian system is not only not tenable, but it is not even intelligible.”

Veblen’s significance may lie neither in his memorable coinages nor his politics. Thorstein Veblen in the Twenty-First Class, an essay collection published to mark the centenary of Leisure Class, argues that the economist’s greatest contribution was inaugurating the field now known as cultural studies. Prior to Veblen, economists tended to view individuals as rationally self-interested actors; Veblen, however, understood that consumerism was a sort of pathology, a species of madness. His genius lay in recognizing the complicated, emotionally fraught relationships we have with our cars and our shoes, our alma maters and our lawns, with all of our stuff. But Veblen’s innovation was less in his ideas about materialism and culture than in his attitude toward it—roughly, that of a pith-helmeted anthropologist studying the strange rituals of the
natives. Leisure Class became a model for a certain style of sociological inquiry: the field guide to American civilization.

Take, for example, much of the work of David Brooks, the New York Times columnist. Generally speaking, he is the sort of conservative liberals can imagine having over for supper. He’s not screechy or reactionary. Plus, he wears dorky glasses and has the tonsure of a small-college professor. Recently, Brooks has had a great deal to say about the reported culture rift between “red” and “blue” states. His latest book, On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense, extols the sensible utopianism of America’s exurbs. But it was his 1999 book Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, a breezy and amusing survey of what the author calls America’s “meritocrats,” that basically put him on the map, pundit-wise. It might even be fair to call him the Veblen of the New Economy—which is to say, a sham Veblen.

Brooks’s Veblenesque approach is apparent from his introduction to Bobos. “The idea,” he writes, “is to get at the essence of cultural patterns, getting the flavor of the times without trying to pin it down with meticulous exactitude.” Like an intrepid naturalist venturing upriver, Brooks goes on to search American culture for signs of a new Mandarin elite, the Bobos, or “Bohemian bourgeoisie.” He finds evidence of their habitations and rituals in the New York Times nuptials section, with its accretion of Ivy League brainpower and old money; in an Anthropologie store in Wayne, Pennsylvania; in the wide availability of lattes in Vermont. Describing what he calls this elite’s “code of financial correctness,” Brooks writes, “Cultivated people are repelled by the idea of keeping up with the Joneses. Nothing is more disreputable than competing with your neighbors by trying to more effectively mimic the style of the social class just above you. Instead, as members of the educated class, you reject status symbols in order to raise your status with your equally cultivated peers. Everything about you might be slightly more casual than your neighbor. Your furnishings must be slightly more peasanty. Your lives should have a greater patina of simplicity.” What Brooks is describing is a twisty, irony-laced form of invidious comparison—that is, pecuniary emulation by way of archaic simplicity.

Like Veblen, Brooks proposes a theory of American social class based on consumer culture. In his view, the Bobos aren’t just a new permutation of the old class pantomime, but a new species of elite, taxonomically speaking. But just because someone affects democratic tastes doesn’t mean he isn’t also part of the old-school hereditary aristocracy (Hello? John Kerry and George W. Bush?). As Thomas Frank asserts in What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, another popular recent work of anthro-punditry indebted to Veblen, Brooks manages to discuss the culture of wealth—the pantomime—without ever substantially discussing wealth itself, still the sine qua non of any elite. This disengagement of hard economics from the discussion of social class in America also owes a great deal to Veblen. Brooks is no Veblen, however: Even a century later, Leisure Class makes the musings of today’s punditry seems as insubstantial as the froth from one of those Vermont lattes.

Of course, if you want to see real proof of the currency of Veblen’s ideas, you shouldn’t be reading books; you should be watching TV. Those commercials urging you to express your rugged individualism by buying a luxury sedan? That’s invidious comparison. Fawning coverage of the lifestyles of celebrities and swashbuckling capitalists? There’s your leisure class. And, as a postmodern spin on Veblen’s symbolic pantomime, consider The Apprentice, a program in which a make-believe Robber Baron turns the social-Darwinian business world into a limp burlesque. I wonder if Veblen himself could have invented a more sublime illustration of the self-parodying barbarian class than The Donald.