Regardless of whether they know anything else, everyone knows one fact: the gap between rich and poor is widening. Everyone knows this. Everyone.
Slack-jawed teens, their lives measured between the skater park and the orthodontist’s chair, can’t tell you why the gap between the seat of their pants and their buttocks is widening every year as belts migrate south through the grimy pampas of pubic hair, but they’ll happily expound on the iniquities of global finance. Indeed, one can no doubt sit in on any kindergarten Show-And-Tell session and discover that little Beauty saw a cat and it was funny, and she got six balloons at the shop and one popped and it was funny, and, and, and, the gap between rich and poor is widening which is not funny, aaaaaaand… she wants a monkey because they are funny but mommy says she can’t have one because it will poo in her hair.
The widening gap makes us sad. It makes us ask probing, insightful questions. Why is the gap widening? Is it a permanent gap? Has it got anything to do with The Gap, and if it does, are we entrenching poverty in the Third World by shopping there? What time does it close on a weekend? If we take the M5, can we still get there? Did we switch off the oven? Jesus wept, why do these goddamn hawkers always touch the windscreen with their goddamn paws just after you’ve had it washed?
The trouble with asking probing, insightful questions is that one isn’t left with much time to ask more obvious ones. For example, which pinstriped think-tank coined this ”widening gap”? What public statement was it prepared for, and to endorse which agenda of the day? What do we mean when we talk about a gap? And is it really widening?
Of course, the intended meanings are clear. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Two paths are diverging. But metaphors about diverging paths are potentially worrying to the middle class, who enjoy using epic language to discuss wholesale squalor. After all, if rich and poor follow their paths for long enough they’re going to meet up at some point, at the other side of the world in some hellish tropical pit, and they’re not going to be pleased to see each other. Reunions are almost always ghastly, but one can’t rule out the possibility that this one would end in fisticuffs and manicured heads on sticks. Of course, it may also end with a call to White Knights Heavily Armed Response and the crap being beaten out of the poor with nightsticks, but the smart money has to be on the big bubbling pot full of breast-implant stew.
Which may be why the idea of a widening gap is so popular in the liberal Western consciousness. Its first profound effect on those who self-medicate with it is to generate intellectual — not emotional — concern. No one ever got worked up over a stretch of empty air, but theoretically it’s still a saddening, troubling, worrying, disgraceful, rhubarb rhubarb phenomenon. Its second, equally powerful effect is reassurance for the rich. If there’s a gap, and we’re on this side of it and they’re on that side, they and their big pot are moving further away from us every day. Thank God for small mercies.
In short, only societies with little or no experience of real poverty could believe in widening gaps, nondescript spaces filled with nothing but rhetoric. Which is not to deny that they struggle with their own widening gaps: the spaces between Victoria Beckham’s desiccated knees and Elton John’s prehensile front teeth are truly harrowing for most decent Britons, and many Americans are finding it increasingly difficult to reconcile the organic slogans on the box of Health-e Free-Range Hog Cracklin’ with the thin film of cellulite developing on their gums and cuticles, but it’s just somehow not the same.
Inhabitants of more pragmatic nations know that the gap between rich and poor, if there is one, is narrowing. Once upon a time it was around 30 kilometres, roughly the range of the SADF’s G4 artillery piece. Today it’s the width of the plate glass between the lobby of one’s office and the cardboard beds on the steps outside.
Should we mind the gap? Or mind the gap in the mind?