A few days ago, my daughter and I carried out her wild idea of re-creating the Last Dinner on the Titanic. It was a daft way of celebrating our own rescue from another sinking passenger ship exactly 41 years ago.
She made cocktails, an elaborate appetizer, and an extravagant dessert. I did salad and meat, both of us following the recipes used on the Titanic. We had to assemble truffles, paté de foie gras, filet mignons, shrimp, saffron, asparagus, artichoke hearts, plus vast quantities of eggs, cream, butter and of booze — champagne, Chartreuse, Madeira, red wine, and cognac.
Hours of work later, we had four of the eleven courses that were served to the first-class passengers on that fateful night that some of them did not survive. The meal was the epitome of conspicuous consumption, of wealth-flaunting and of calories-be-damned, full speed ahead. It’s a wonder they didn’t die in the dining room, before the ship hit the iceberg.
Below decks, in steerage, the menu included gruel and boiled potatoes. Gruel. On the menu. And so little room in the lifeboats that three quarters of the steerage passengers drowned.
That whole cooking experience had me looking at the chasm between the rich and everybody else in the US now and seeing a match to that earlier era’s excesses of the wealthy, and its disregard for people who weren’t rich enough to be up there in that posh dining room, eating truffles.
There are a few outspoken politicians today who talk about income and wealth inequality in this country, but for most of them, it seems to have become the new third rail. And in the public at large, there are vicious battles over mask-wearing, immigration, and abortion, but not about inequality — despite the fact that that imbalance fuels so many other problems that threaten the well-being and stability of the republic — and impact all our lives.
Yes, race plays an important role in the current tensions ripping this country apart but race and the wealth gap are intertwined.
Income and wealth inequality pretty much determine where people live and how they live. Redlining may be illegal but that hasn’t stopped bankers and local zoning boards from creating income ghettos in our cities and suburbs.
