10-27-05, 10:00 am

At eleven o’clock on any weekday morning, Rancho El Camino, an equestrian academy, training and boarding facility, is an oasis of hooves, hay and calm amid the alarmingly overdeveloped and still-overdeveloping rolling hills just east of Del Mar. Horses in pipe corrals range from showy, privately owned Arabs and retired thoroughbreds to the hardworking school horses – aging quarterhorses and mixed breeds, largely – used for riding lessons. The horses don’t know caste differences. Rank and hierarchy exist, but based on temperament, not price-tag or pedigree. In fact, one of the feistiest animals at the barn is Twinky, a lesson pony that most of us know better than to approach from behind. And one of the gentlest, most personable and affectionate is Warlock, a magnificent Friesian, 16.2 hands tall and as massive as one of the colossal Lexus or Ford SUV’s in which the trophy moms of Del Mar and Rancho Santa Fe convey their trophy children to after-school lessons.
But then, this is morning, and the trophy element are happily confined to some of the unwittingly aristocratic horses at Rancho El Camino or neighboring stables. Wanda, head of the riding school, is busy giving a white pony named China a haircut. China stands patiently as Wanda’s clippers trim first one fetlock, then the other. Rebecca, one of the teacher/trainers, is turning out a showy roan Appaloosa in the front arena. Sandi, my riding teacher, accompanied by her Lab mix Cheyenne, is loading buckets of feed onto a small electric golf cart. As for me, I am making the rounds with carrots for the three I consider my “pets”: Oreo, an ill-tempered Welsh pony who will stomp insistently as soon as he spies the treats; Warlock, gentle giant and Friesian of my dreams; and Sugar, part-Arab, part-quarterhorse, my favorite, regular mount for nearly five years. I ride Warlock too, thanks to the generosity of his owner, a beautiful, fearless horsewoman from Germany named Nicole.

Every now and then, even I will allow that not all rich people outside of the late Joan Kroc are the problem of evil. Most, but not all. That ratio is also true of the wealthy patrons of Rancho El Camino. There is the one woman, with her beautiful silver Arab and her beautiful silver 500-series Mercedes that has a license frame boasting “I’m Not Spoiled – My Husband Just Loves Me.” Someone told me that this woman is a successful real estate agent, so her declaration of trophy wife status is all the more puzzling though no less offensive. Then there is Marisa, a novice rider with a $40,000 Hanoverian. Mainly she seems to cruise around the grounds in a customized BMW golf cart, though to what purpose no one seems to know. Marisa unintentionally enlightened me as to the existence of the subcategory of trophy ex-wife, as her former husband is buying her a $3 million home in Rancho Santa Fe. In the meantime, Marisa is living with her mother, and evidently Grandmaman doesn’t permit slumber parties. Thus Marisa is renting a suite at the luxurious L’Auberge of Del Mar so that her young daughter and friends may giggle until all hours in their pajamas and order room-service popcorn. Word has it that Marisa said of the devoted if somewhat daffy woman who takes care of her fancy steed, gratis, for her, “She’s very lucky to be even around such an expensive horse.” The daffy equinophile is named Stacey, and she voted for Bush. Go figure.

These trophy wives, ex-wives and trophy offspring contrast sharply with the real horse people at the barn as well as with the delightfully democratic horses. The real horse people scrimp to pay for feed, board, vet and farrier; they muck out their own corrals, drive Hondas and Mustangs and pickup trucks sturdy enough to pull a trailer; they wear Lee or Wrangler jeans and sport ponytails and braids rather than salon cuts and blonde highlights. In fact, most of the trophy wives are brassy blondes – I don’t think I’ve seen so many since the Clinton impeachment loosed a veritable fleet of towheaded, miniskirted, right-wing bimbos upon the cable news networks to opine about the president’s duplicitous blowjob.

All politics is local, and everything is political. Axioms I live by, and that are driven home to me each time I linger at the stables long enough to witness the caravan of SUVs rolling in at around three o’clock. I wear my anti-Bush T-shirts proudly and park my little Toyota with its leftist bumper stickers right alongside the BMW’s and Ford Explorers. I don’t make a point of doing so. It’s just that I prefer to wear light-colored shirts when I ride, and my car is, after all, what it is. But if my “Impeach Bush” shirt and “We Are The Rogue State” sticker give inadvertent offense to the vulgar rich, well, so be it. The feeling is mutual. Of course, the haves simply think the have-nots are envious. Poor dears, they didn’t go to the right schools, never met/married the right people, chose squishy “liberal” careers like college professor or journalist instead of pursuing MBA’s (either as degrees or husbands). And I suppose some on the left might accuse me of hypocrisy for not having chosen a more proletarian hobby, or at least a more affordable one. Or, having chosen to ride for pleasure, why didn’t I seek out stables in the more socioeconomically diverse areas of East County or South Bay? But none of my fellow leftists ask these questions; it is I who pose them to myself. Maybe it’s residual Catholic guilt. I feel like “Seinfeld’s” Elaine, who, when shamed for having bought candy after hearing her boyfriend was struck by a car, protested pitiably, “But … I like Jujubes!” I like Rancho El Camino. I like the people who work there, a number of my fellow riders and above all the horses, Sugar and Warlock and Oreo, and even the ones plain and fancy that I pause briefly to admire as I turn into that dirt road off Old El Camino Real or pass by on my way to visit my “pets.” I can love my barn without pretending not to notice the great and seemingly insurmountable class divide that characterizes the human society drawn to the equine one. Just as I can love California while still denouncing the serial sexual abuser and shameless union-baiter most voters chose as governor; just as I can love my country while despising its current policies and executive branch, and remaining committed to radical structural change beyond the catch-22 of the present system. The Republicans are fond of charging the left with fomenting “class warfare” at the even slightest, most timorous Democratic reference to the widening gap between the wealthy and – well, the rest of us. Usually, the timorous Democrat backs down, or opts for euphemisms like “working families” and “corporate responsibility.” Why do so many of us on the left back down, as if admitting we’ve committed an egregious social faux pas? I grew up believing that vulgarity was a matter of conspicuous consumption, price-tag-dropping and blithe indifference to the plight of the nonprivileged. Now vulgarity apparently is acknowledging that the superrich are reaping most of the benefits of the free market while thumbing their noses at even the most modest notions of social responsibility and distributive justice.

We apologize for offending, shut up, and of course, by design nothing changes. Perhaps I am no less guilty. One time at the stables, after a women’s group lesson, half a dozen of us were having coffee and doughnuts at one of the picnic tables. It was days before the California recall election, and I brought up the substantiated (and by the way, never refuted) allegations of sexual abuse by candidate Schwarzenegger. One woman – yes, a wealthy woman newly bronzed from a two-week vacation in Maui – rejoined, “Oh, who doesn’t have something like that in the past.” I held my ground, calmly replying that I felt it was women’s responsibility to quit excusing or tolerating gross sexual harassment on the old “boys will be boys” grounds. She snapped at me, “Let’s not talk politics!” And I shut up. For the sake of peace, I told myself; the other women were in fact looking uncomfortable. I’m here for the horses, not the people, I also told myself. For Sugar and Warlock and Oreo. For the calm against the stresses of my life as an American earning under $30,000 a year who scrimps and borrows to pay my bills and somehow still have enough left over each month to ride.

So I backed down. But don’t tell me class warfare is a figment of the resentful left-wing imagination. It’s real, and we’re not the side that declared it. And it’s alive and prospering even at my equine oasis, an oasis that perhaps in 10 years will have been swallowed up by the ever-encroaching developments of seven-figure homes in “planned communities.” The trophy people will take their trophy horses elsewhere, possibly to their own estates in Rancho Santa Fe, while humble school horses will be in need of homes. The horses over 18, as many of the school horses tend to be, will have the hardest time finding ones.

Only then will the class warfare intrude upon the natural egalitarianism of the horses’ world.



--Contact Karin S. Coddon through pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.