Vestiges

[degringolade]

Post-Impressionism / Vincent van Gogh/ The Bridge

When I get into arguments about politics with people my age, I find that there is a certain disconnect that I can’t get past.  I hesitate to call it this, but the divide is one of class and the beliefs and preconceptions drilled into the individual by their upbringing.  

Most of my friends are from comfortable middle-class America.  I harken from lower class America.  Middle class America was raised from the get-go to slot into a system and take their roles in what was thought to be an ever expanding galaxy of good paying middle management jobs with retirements, vacations at golf courses in exotic climes, and a new car every couple of years.  My buddies got this.  I am truly happy for them.

I came from dirt poor Italian truck farmers crossed with Appalachian moonshiners.  I was the first college graduate ever in either clan.  I grew up with distrust of the system (my Nona’s quote about banks was “lo stesso della mafia”) with a commensurate mistrust of all the greedy middlemen who tried to insinuate themselves into the chain from producer to consumer.  I don’t think that I need to detail the views of the Appalachian side.  

I made the attempt to join the middle class lifestyle, but I am afraid that it never really took.  Part of it was my distrust of the middlemen and another part was their distrust in me.  One of these days I need to sit down and write about the misadventures in the uppercrust that led me back here to the lowest strata of the middle (or is it the upper strata of the lower?)

So, while I want to get annoyed with them for their beliefs and prejudices, I have to remember that they are annoyed with me about mine.  

Comments

missing paul fussell

[chefxh]

I read Class in paperback in about 1986 and, trite as it sounds, it changed my life.

AS GOD IS MY WITNESS

[mschmidt]

I was raised in a hardscrabble situation within a mid-sized city named Wheaton – Illinois that is.

I say hardscrabble because my family was not in the upper stratum of Wheaton – more like the middle, or lower-middle; so, I know better than most what it means to be looked down upon - and I learned how to do it myself the old-fashioned way – by passing the lesson on to those in the lower strata of Wheaton, and after getting a driver’s license, to the surrounding areas. Racism might have offered benefits for some, but not for me, because the lower strata was all white.

This brings me to my point. You are letting elderly ex-suburbanites off easy. You have missed a step in the historical process that makes the bastards (many of whom look similar to me unfortunately) look even worse.

Recall that the popular thing to do in the 60s-70s was to reject the “establishment” that delivered the wealth and privilege that built and filled the suburbs.

Well ... after trying out the idea of rejecting the wealth and privledged for a while, the result was a generation of the privileged saying the same thing that Scarlett O’Hare said after she had a spell of no wealth and privilege: “as God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again”.

Thus, the privileged did not just step into a world of privilege, they came running back full speed to a world of privilege – thus, with lots of momentum. Maybe this has something to do with a now conditioned tendency to protect the establishment.