The Weekly Screed (#552)

The evolution of Romy Schneider’s America
by David Benjamin

PARIS — The Republican vision for America’s future keeps popping up in
old movies.

My latest flash of GOP déjà vu came unexpectedly, while I feasted with
friends in a tiny Italian village. As we ate, the television unspooled
a 1955 German movie dubbed in Italian. The only face I recognized was
Romy Schneider as the title character, “Sissi,” who was — as best I
could guess — princess of Austro-Hungary. I tried to ignore the TV.
But the sheer spectacle, in vibrant, tear-inducing Agfacolor, kept
pulling me back into the charming, although completely
incomprehensible life story of the woman I later learned was
Elizabeth, Empress of Austro-Hungary from 1854-1898.

The film, “Sissi,” lacks two elements whose absence works together to
attain a sort of transcendent tedium rarely seen in non-German cinema.
The film, as far as I could tell, has no dramatic tension. Its
shimmering characters float through velvet-draped rooms in a silken
castle atop an inaccessible mountain. They are beautifully, elegantly,
opulently oblivious to any events that might be going on in the
outside world— which is the movie’s other absent element. The universe
is a sound stage steeped in luxury.

In “Sissi,” the richest .0001 percent of the people in the empire have
no physical or social contact with the subjects they’re supposed to be
in charge of, except for a handful of blank-faced servants who rush
off-camera as quickly as their legs can carry them.

Were there poor people in Austro-Hungary in the19th century? Was there
hunger? Was almost everyone illiterate? Was there injustice? Did as
many as half of newborns die before reaching the age of three? Did the
royal family of Franz-Joseph tax the poor, and squeeze tradesmen, to
underwrite their masked balls, their boar hunts and their
psychosomatic ailments? Was Austro-Hungary the corrupt relic of
Europe’s parasitic feudal past? Was Austro-Hungary, in fact, the
reactionary cesspool of incestuous aristocracy and lese majesté that
triggered World War I, annihilating a generation of young men and
spawning the bad seed that became Adolf Hitler?

Well, probably. But who knows? From this movie, you couldn’t get a
clue that there was carbon-based life anywhere in Austro-Hungary
outside the castle — where every room was pretty and everyone was
happy. And why shouldn’t they be happy? These folks had so much money
and power that they never had to think about money. They were so high
up the mountain, in the upper rooms of the tallest building in the
empire that, even if they looked out and saw ordinary people, those
people seemed like ants.

As I watched director Ernst Marischka’s idyll of good-old-days
Austro-Hungary, it occurred to me that my very own countrymen have
been working tirelessly, over the past 30 years, to turn America into
the same movie. Indeed, Republican progress toward re-creating the
court of Franz-Joseph in the land of the free is outright awesome.
Although the U.S. has never really been a model of financial equality,
we are now the second least-equal democracy on earth, just behind
Switzerland. We stand on the brink of creating our very own crowned
and castled upper crust, suitable for filming.

In the last 30 years, tax policy and spending priorities have made
America a little more Austro-Hungarian every day. Our median household
wealth, for instance, has dropped 36 percent just since 2007. In other
words, most of us have lost a third of what we had just four years
ago! Sixty percent of American households earn less than they earned
in 1979, the year before Ronald Reagan (the Franz-Joseph of the GOP)
told us it was “morning in America.” Today, more than 24 percent of
U.S. households have no marketable assets. In other words, a quarter
of us own, literally, nothing. This is the highest percentage ever
recorded. Three decades of upward wealth redistribution, promoted by
Republicans and enabled by Democrats, is creating a sea of silent
peasants. We wash up against but never disturb the sound stage where
Romy Schneider floats from ballroom to throne-room in organdy and
petticoats, and has babies who magically appear without requiring her
to even drop her lace knickers or suffer through childbirth.

Of course, if the future consigns most of us to peasanthood, a few of
us will have to be the Romy Schneiders. So far, this is working out
real good, too. Between 2006 and 2007, average income for the 400
richest Americans soared 31 percent — in one year! — from $263 million
to $345 million. This was before Congress extended the Bush tax cuts
for the aristocracy and showered them with even more welfare.

And those top 400 — the ones who can afford to build castles so high
up that all the rest of us seem like ants —are due for another big
windfall, as soon as the Republican Congress zeroes out the estate
tax. This tax cut will only serve six-tenths of one percent of
Americans, but — in a direct handout from us peasants to Romy
Schneider — it will upwardly redistribute $100 billion a year.

Today’s debt-ceiling battle represents a possible breakthrough in the
crusade to enrich the uber-rich and disenfranchise the
never-franchised. A GOP victory might finally turn our underloved Top
400 silver-spooners into a glistening court full of inbred royals and
waltzing dandies, reminiscent of Sissi, Franz-Joseph, and Strauss’s
Vienna.

Picture it! When we see one of our new aristocrats pass in a
limousine, tossing a jujube out the window for our children to fight
over, we’ll know that our taxes went directly to paying for those
solid-gold bumpers and that $24-a-quart gas.

And when one of our princesses appears on TV — in designer gown and
diamond-hung décolletage — to generously bestow a month’s supply of
day-old bread on the soup kitchen where we eat every day, we’ll know
that dazzling lady would not have that perfect nose and those perky
snow-white breasts if not for our sacrifices.

Best of all, whenever we consider the far-distant lives of our
tax-free American aristocracy — whose villas, tennis courts and
airstrips will be, of necessity, in places beyond America— we’ll know
they know nothing of us, nor will they be troubled by anyone else’s
troubles. We’ll be consoled with the assurance that these iconic
creatures have no idea of the deprivation — from sea to shining sea —
that makes conceivable a handful of lives lived without dramatic
tension.