Rich People Things, with Chris Lehmann: Rich Enough for You?

Okay, so this is pretty much the reason why we have a New York Times Sunday Styles section: to rally its readers in a time of raw, unknowing confusion; to dispense the essential information they need in order to make sense of a world seemingly turned upside down; to assure that the bare coordinates of consensual reality remain intact in a social order suddenly deranged by crisis. To grant its imprimatur, in short, to the term "Bling Ring."

Sure, as Styles correspondent Allen Salkin generously explains, the coinage belongs to the rival L.A. Times, which together with the terminally addled celeb site TMZ, was among the first outlets reporting the saga of the gang of Calabasas, Calif., teens who ransacked the houses of Hollywood's dumb, rich and famous set while its members were out filming, attending benefit events or otherwise toxing or detoxing. But the Times is the Paper of Record, after all, and the Sunday Styles section rightfully owns the official sanction to sort out the bewildering tangle of players and social forces that conspired to make Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan-hell, even Brian Austin Green-the quarry of common, striving, starstruck hoods from the San Fernando Valley.

It's a fearsomely difficult business, as Salkin stipulates early on: "The tale lies at the intersection of celebrity, teen culture, reality TV and the Internet"-the latter being the medium the gang used to pinpoint the locations and track the whereabouts of its celebutant prey. Indeed, one of the alleged perps, Alexis Neiers, "was arrested on the set of a reality show pilot she is filming for E! with her sister Tess Taylor, a Playboy model." Whereupon Salkin supplies the echt-Styles section set-up for the sumptuous narrative to follow: "Rich enough for you?"

Well, no, actually-since Salkin's laundry list of intersecting social trends omits the one key motive force that lurks through the contemporary mediascape like the ghost of Tom Joad: social class. It's a reality that his chronicle strenuously seeks to deny at the outset, by noting that Calabasas is "an affluent suburb." True, it's "more rural than the Hollywood Hills, some 30 minutes away," where Bling Ring members did much of their thieving. But hey, it definitely "has its share of stars: Will Smith and Kourtney Kardashian from the reality show 'Keeping Up with the Kardashians.'"

Now, you know your enabling sociological conceit is creaky when you're resting fully half of it on a Kardashian who isn't even Kim. And you know it's effectively dead in the water when you craft your nut graph around this crucial insight from Jason Pierce, the host of the local-access cable show, Calabasas Teen Forum: "Young people see a lifestyle on television and have peer pressure and constant bombardment from the media to have what other people have, to want what other people want and to try to live the dream." There you have it: Calabasas is a place so tantalizingly proximate to the glittering cathedrals of LA celebrity that TV has precisely the same effect there that it does everywhere else!

Nevertheless, if you're Sunday Styles reporter, you press gamely on. But even as Salkin recites gauzy evocations of la vie Calabasasianne like this-"celebrities and a celebrity lifestyle are close enough to reach out and touch, even more so thanks to gossipy Web sites that track the nightly antics of celebutants and reality shows like The Hills"-a very different set of social conditions obtrudes, via the irksome biographical details he must provide about the background of the six actually detained Ring members.

Take the teen who the LA police have fingered as the ringleader of the gang, Rachel Lee. She met up with Nicholas Prujo-whom other alleged perps have claimed is the real mastermind-while both "were classmates at a remedial high school, Indian Hills, to which they transferred because of truancy issues at Calabas High School, friends said." Not much reality-show glamour there, I'm afraid-nor in the news that Lee lived in a "small house near the high school," where her mom, "who had been single for many years, started a relationship that displeased" the daughter.

The legal countercharges already flying are also far more suggestive of the kind of class conflict you see on The Jerry Springer Show rather than My Super Sweet Sixteen. Prugo's attorney, Sean Erenstoft, for instance, is "seeking to portray Mr. Prugo as a young man with low self-esteem who was manipulated by Ms. Lee," as Salkin notes.

Not that Lee comes off as an especially cunning Svengali-type, in the Prugo team's account. "Rachel for fun would break into cars in rich neighborhoods," Erenstoft told Salkin. "She would yank on the handles of cars to see if they were locked. They find an open door, grab a roach." Now, maybe it's just me, but the spectacle of kids collecting marijuana leavings from car floors, presumably to assemble into a furtively toked bowlful of the stuff in a remedial high school parking lot, doesn't exactly conjure an image of teen celeb voyeurism run amok.

Indeed, the patient reader, plowing on to the thirtieth or so paragraph of Salkin's piece will discover that even the delicious reality-TV set piece that furnished our Styles reporter with his "Rich enough for you?" catchphrase is a decidedly down-market affair. "A person familiar with the show the sisters are filming for E! said it is about growing up on self-help books like The Secret."

The Secret, of course, is the Oprah-endorsed New Thought treatise positing that all good things are realized through a simple "law of attraction" and that "the only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts"-the sort of singularly destructive twaddle, in other words, that desperately unsuccessful people throng to as a last spiritual resort. None of which, of course, will stop enterprising E! producers from minting all sorts of chuckle-and-snort reality drama out of such pitiful longings. (Indeed, carelessly including "reality TV" in the litany of cultural forces now deranging our proper social hierarchies was a telling oversight on Salkin's part, since the rarely uttered byword of the genre is class predation.)

And on the litany of suburban SoCal seediness goes. Another alleged Bling Ringer, "Ms. [Diana] Tamayo, who has been charged in the burglaries of Ms. Lohan and Ms. Tisdale… lived in one of the few apartment buildings in Calabasas with her family while attending high school"-again, at the remedial Indian Hills facility, where she won the office of class president and "best smile" honors in the 2007 yearbook while also earning "a reputation for getting into fights," according to current and former students. Even Prugo, the only gang member with an identifiable entertainment-world pedigree, is the son of a low-end international film-distribution executive, whose firm recently got lucky by handling the rights to the $11,000 breakout smash Paranormal Activity. His mother-who would likely not work at all if his dad possessed real studio-executive bona fides-"runs a dog-walking service," Salkin is obliged to note.

But there's no way that Salkin and his editors can permit this depressingly banal social background-the class-determined fatalism that shapes the careers of petty criminals throughout these United States, even in suburbs in no way adjacent to the capitals of the culture industry-to swarm the gossamer Internet-as-agent-of-social delusion foreground of their dispatch. So the last word in the piece of course belongs to Lindsey Lohan's attorney, Blair Berk, who writes the whole affair off to the mad carousel of renown in our age of instant celebrity. "Wait until they become the people they robbed," she says of the Bling Ring's members. "Give it 60 days before these kids are household names."

Actually, give it 60 days before someone like alleged Ring member Roy Lopez Jr.-who worked as a bouncer "at the Sagebrush Cantina, a popular restaurant in Calabasas" and in no way "looks like the cast of Twilight," as another waggish Hollywood attorney characterizes the suspect list in this case—is keelhauled on charges from the talentless hotel heiress he is purported to have robbed (charges that his lawyer roundly denies). Upon his release, he'd likely have to count himself lucky to find a busboy job. But you have your fun, Mr. Salkin and other members of the Sunday Styles cognoscenti: It turns out that this yarn, at least as you're telling it, is actually way too rich for the likes of me.

Haven't had enough of Chris Lehmann fulminating about class inequality? Then go see him this Thursday night at the Tishman Center of the New School, where he's hosting a star-studded panel on Labor Issues in the 21st Century.