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POLITICS
Modern Life Meets Downton Abbey
Except with fewer ball gowns
I love period dramas for their architecture and costuming, but lately I’ve noticed they offer glimpses into our future.
We are racing to return to a Gilded Age (not precisely the Downton Abbey time period, but close enough) in which a few wealthy people lead lives of unimaginable wealth and masses of poor people lead lives of desperation, with very few people in between.
On the surface, everything in these dramas is beautiful.
Things are less appealing when you consider how all those ball gowns, carriages and manor houses are paid for.
The expensively arrayed ladies and gentlemen idly sipping sherry in their drawing rooms never give a thought to the poor masses all around them.
They never appear to acknowledge that some poor servant is hefting giant cans of water upstairs to fill their tubs with steaming water so they can loll around and enjoy a hot bath.
They know their fortune comes from small children working in their cotton mills or men coughing their lives out in their coal mines, but that does not seem to bother them one bit.
