The princess of extreme individualism

This was in the chronically crowded parking lot at our local Trader Joe's a few days ago. I was lucky to land a space directly in front of the store. When I got in the car to leave, there was a black BMW 325-series sedan next to me on my left.

I started to crank the ignition when a young blonde got in the BMW. I decided to let her back out first. Ninety-five percent of the time, it's better that way. She backed halfway out of the space and stopped. As I say, it's a crowded lot with a layout that invites congestion, particularly right in front of the store.

I started the car and waited. The BMW didn't move. After 45 seconds (yes, I have great patience in parking lots – it's better that way), I decided it wasn't going to move, for whatever reason. So, seeing I had room to get around her, I backed out, and when I was even with the BMW's front windows, I glanced at the driver. She was texting.

Her car was half out of the space, and half into the bustling aisle behind, and she continued to text. I was more eager to depart the lot than I was to dwell on her behavior, so I backed on out. Then, I had to cross behind her. I recognized the peril, that that would be the instant she finished the texting and backed again, with proven disregard for anyone behind her.

But I made it, a blog already forming in my head: if you want an excellent example of how this country has not only become polarized, but atomized, by cascading devotion to self-interest, go take a spin in the nearest mall parking lot.

Then you can join me in contributing to a dialogue launched by The New York Times, addressing the national selfishness. The launch document was a July 4 op-ed piece, titled "The Downside of Liberty," by Kurt Andersen, who argues that this national selfishness had its roots in the individualism revolution (free love, hippies, etc.) of the late 1960s.

It was called the "hippie generation." But it wasn't just hippies. In the 1980s and '90s, it became the "me generation," as young people of all cultural persuasions discovered the pleasures of ignoring what Andersen calls "the civic good." But here is Andersen's epiphany: it didn't stop with cultural norms.

"Going forward," he writes, "the youthful masses of every age would be permitted as never before to indulge their self-expressive and hedonistic impulses. But capitalists in return would be unshackled as well, free to indulge their own animal spirits with fewer and fewer fetters in the forms of regulation, taxes or social opprobrium."

So the national selfishness reaches from texters outside Trader Joe's to managers inside Wall Street. Only Andersen doesn't call it "selfishness." He calls it "extreme individualism." I love that. It describes my Beemer princess precisely.