03-27-2021, 01:18 AM
(03-02-2021, 03:23 PM)Einzige Wrote: Fussell is wrong. Everythibg he considers as "middle" and below is proletarian. Everything above is bourgeois.
It wasn't wrong when Fussell wrote it in 1983, when class was largely cultural identity more than it was income. So imagine two people living in the same general area, one an attorney (Mr. White) and the other a plumbing contractor (Mr. Blue), earning the same income. Aside from having the same means with which to spend money, they are likely to spend it differently. The pluming contractor is high-prole, a highly-skilled worker who may be a fairly good salesman competent with numbers so that he can tract business -- basically installing or replacing pluming. The attorney? That takes more formal learning,
The attorney Mr. White is more likely to have a passport. He has his bucket list ("Far away places with strange-sounding names"). Mr. Blue is more likely to own an RV that he and his family drive on long-distance journeys to places that don't have such strange-sounding names, unless "Kalamazoo" is such a place. The RV is for all practical purposes a moving motel room. One cannot drive an RV to Denmark.
It is more likely that Mr. White has a huge bookshelf full of books... and Mr. Blue doesn't. If Mr. Blue has bookshelves they might be full of souvenirs, bowling trophies, or other such stuff that requires little reading. Mr. Blue thinks books are boring. He wears "legible clothing" that says something without the wearer having to say something. It may have a designer name on it such as "GUCCI" that means little more than that one is a sucker for advertising. Mr. White needs nothing of the sort. Mr. Blue thinks himself clever with words, but one gets such locutions as "on account of how" instead of the simpler "because". Mr. Blue's kids are smart enough to attend college, but not smart enough to graduate. Or maybe they lack the curiosity and self-discipline and recognize a college education as frills. Whatever, Mr. White's kids are going to be happy enough in the family business.
Of course, 1983 was when class was largely more a matter of the level of taste and refinement (a huge gap between the upper-middle and high-prole classes), more decided by what one's status symbols are instead of having them.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.