If I Only Had a Maid

What will we do on Sunday nights at 9:00 now that Downton Abbey is concluding its second series? Order up a household staff? Get a footman to brush off our lint?

It's been fun, this romp through British aristocracy, and I look forward to Series 3 this fall. Nonetheless, I ask myself why--like so many people--I'm hooked. Lots of reasons, I've concluded. It's an excellent plot. It has the same elements that made Victorian readers await Charles Dickens' next installment of The Pickwick Papers and, more recently, children (and often their parents) await Harry Potter's next adventure. In all our pseudo-sophistication we forget sometimes the power of a well-told story.

Downton Abbey is also great theater. The acting is excellent. Watching Maggie Smith skewer an opponent or Hugh Bonneville dispatch a threat satisfies at the deepest level, while period costumes and views of the British countryside create a visual delight.

At the same time, it's interesting that this show arrives in America just as we're learning that we're not the Horatio Alger society that we thought we were. As Paul Krugman writes recently in The New York Times, "Among rich countries, America stands out as the place where economic and social status is most likely to be inherited." Hmm, we thought that's what England was all about.

So it turns out that in watching Downton Abbey we're watching a version of ourselves, albeit from the comfortable distance of time and space. In this spirit, I've composed a piece that kept bouncing around in my head, based on "If I Only Had a Brain," from The Wizard of Oz:

I could be a one-percenter
And pay a tax rate lower
Than all the folks downstairs.
I could be a hedge fund owner
All those loopholes, all the better
If I only had a maid.

I could be just like Lord Grantham
And live inside a mansion
Commanding everyone.
But the British do it better
Here I'm only a jet setter
Oh, I wish I had a maid.

Yes, I could be a Lord
I'm sure I'd not be bored
I could think of things like capital gains
And then I'd sit and earn some more.

I'd make all that unearned income
That guarantees a big sum
I'd be a lot like Mitt.
Here I come, oh Downton Abbey
With my tax-exempted plenty
Yes, I found myself a maid.