The Grotesque American Wedding

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, July 21, 2020

 

“One hundred Irish politicians!” Janet Auchincloss’s daughter, Jackie, was set to marry John Kennedy, which meant her daughter was set to marry the Kennedy family’s social ambitions.

 

“The wedding will be just awful — quite dreadful,” Mrs. Auchincloss lamented. Jackie had wanted a small, intimate wedding, but Joseph Kennedy wanted to reinvent his grubby little clan as the American royal family. He got his way. He usually did.

 

They should have listened to Jackie.

 

American weddings are often grotesque affairs, a weird mix of lacy white princess dresses and neck tattoos, Pachelbel and Bon Jovi. They weren’t always such spectacles. Here are the Eisenhowers on their wedding day. If there are 16 young women with matching dresses of lavender taffeta, they are out of the frame. Here are the Hemingways, Papa’s unhappy first time around. Pretty low-key. I think it is unlikely that the future Mrs. Hemingway wore a plastic tiara and drank 18 cosmopolitans the night before.

 

(The groom might have.)

 

For many years, people typically got married at home, or in the home of a family member, in front of a small group of people. The only common alternative was a church. Even very fancy people with more elaborate weddings usually got married at home: When young Franklin Roosevelt married Eleanor, the bride was given away by her uncle, the president of the United States of America. The Roosevelts were, as Joe Biden might have put it, a BFD. They got married at the house of the bride’s grandmother (a pretty nice house) and then went on a week’s honeymoon not to Cancun but 88 miles away in Hyde Park, N.Y., where the groom was from. (They later took a three-month European tour.) When John D. Rockefeller’s daughter got married, she got married at the family home. (The particulars are pretty gaudy-sounding.) Calvin and Grace Coolidge were married in front of 15 people in her father’s living room. Coolidge was only 18 years away from the presidency.

 

The American wedding has been transformed in part by New World middle-class imitation of Old World royalty. White dresses weren’t socially obligatory for anyone except English debutantes being presented to the monarch for the first time; Queen Victoria’s white wedding dress is popularly credited for transforming that piece of court etiquette into what became the modern convention. (For a point of comparison, see Gerald and Betty Ford.) Diamond engagement rings, though not unheard-of, were in many quarters considered excessively showy, but that custom slowly worked its way down from the Archduke Maximilian of Austria to modern middle-class ubiquity.

 

The desire of the bourgeoisie to ape the titled aristocracy remains even in our own time: When her husband was the prime minister of the United Kingdom, Cherie Blair made a point of wearing a white dress for a meeting with the pope, which as a matter of ancient custom was a privilege reserved to Catholic monarchs. The Blairs wanted to be the Kennedys, and the Kennedys wanted to be the Mountbatten-Windsors. It is notable that Donald Trump is fascinated by a title of nobility, which he gave both to his imaginary friend/press agent and to his youngest son: John Barron (sometimes “John Baron”) and Barron Trump. The Trumps’ efforts to link their own family to the British royals is the stuff of a thousand cringes. There were not a hundred Irish politicians at Trump’s most recent wedding, though Billy Joel and the Clintons were in attendance.

 

It probably is not coincidence that Americans got very serious about the spectacle of the wedding right around the same time they began giving up on the idea of marriage. “Until death do us part” is tough, but a “big day” we can still manage. All you need is bad taste and money.

 

This brings me to the actual subject of today’s letter, which is, of course, debt.

 

Last week, Slate published a particularly insipid piece of sympathy journalism (it is part of a series) under the headline: “What It’s Like to Have $163,718 of Student Debt When You’re Living Paycheck to Paycheck: The story of Arthur Stallworth, age 36, from Silver Spring, Maryland.” Sympathy is a barrier to good journalism because it prevents the asking of necessary questions. (“Empathy,” which our politicians like to talk about, is not an emotion at all but a literary conceit.) For example: Mr. Stallworth reports a household income of $125,000 a year, which is not too bad for a man with an “online doctorate of education and interdisciplinary leadership.” There are lawyers and architects who do worse. (The report is silent about how much of the couple’s income comes from Mr. Stallworth and how much comes from his wife.) In spite of that income, he says he “couldn’t afford it” when his loan repayments rose . . . from $200 a month to $400 a month. Really? His household income is twice the national average; how is it that he is getting wiped out by a $200-a-month increase in a longstanding bill? The headline promises to tell us “what it’s like” to be in that guy’s shoes, so curiosity is assumed. What’s the deal?

 

Likewise: Mr. Stallworth reports that his student debt was $100,000 when he got his doctorate five years ago, but today it is $163,718.20. That implies an interest rate in excess of 10 percent a year, but student-loan interest rates are generally a lot less than that. (Federal loans currently are at 0.00 percent because of the epidemic, but the rates run from 2.75 percent for undergraduate borrowers to 5.30 percent for unsubsidized graduate-student loans.) There’s probably a good explanation for how that happened, but that explanation isn’t in Rachelle Hampton’s story, which is supposed to be a story about debt but remains willfully vague on the financial details.

 

What is in the story, instead, are observations such as this one: “Halfway through, I reached the point where I was really, really done with Nebraska. I was always in PWIs [predominantly white institutions]. At first you don’t really recognize that stuff, but then people say things like, ‘You don’t have any hair.’ No, I have a fade. But they don’t know what a fade is.”

 

I am not entirely surprised that some predominantly white people in Nebraska do not have a satisfactory vocabulary for discussing tonsorial matters with African-American colleagues. It is not clear what that has to do with Mr. Stallworth’s personal debt situation. And that situation is extraordinary considering he got a “full ride” for his undergraduate degree, with a scholarship that covered both tuition and room and board. How does this actually happen?

 

And, then, the kicker: “I had to take out a loan from my retirement in order to pay for our wedding.”

 

At which point, I found myself saying out loud: “Well, no. No, you didn’t.”

 

You didn’t have to. It wasn’t obligatory. You could have gone to city hall in the morning and taken your friends and family out to a nice lunch afterward. (You know what they would have done? They would have thanked you. Most weddings are dreadful.) People do it all the time. Here, what he needed was a visit from Bob Newhart in therapist mode: “Don’t do that.”

 

Mr. Stallworth is hardly alone in his assumptions about what simply must be done. There is a great deal to dig into there, but, for the moment, I will conclude with this: The belief that you simply must have a burdensomely expensive dog-and-pony show to get married and the belief that you simply must have a “doctorate of education and interdisciplinary leadership” to lead an educational institution — and that both of these must be had even at the cost of assuming ruinous debt — are, at the foundation, the same belief, rooted in the same error.

 

A society unmoored from genuine values will embrace meretricious ones, just as a society disconnected from divinity will always find something to worship — what do you think is really going on in our ridiculous modern weddings?