Wanna talk about Class?

a classless society is not possible. people suck and will always pick on those they find weaker or to make themselves feel less weak. That's that.

Well, I agree with you so far about a classless system being impossible. But I don't think it means we suck.

oh of course not us..... but them..... different story. :wink:

bookmark.....

Ha! Yeah...them.
Hmm..I wonder if we're talking about the same people.

I don't think Bear likes people who don't suck, though.

well I hope so because if you're not one of us.... well....

cypher, now you've got my head in the ditch and my intentions were so good.

Will be back to see what happens here and continue. Have an honest interest in this. Unfortunately, being pretty po', I gotta work the graveyard tonight. So gotta snooze. heh.

Prastic grass gots rotsa crass.

Pwastic Gwasses?

Teachers do it with class. My way of bookmarking.

Re: Wanna talk about Class?

Grew up around upper middle class and filthy rich. Housekeepers, gardeners, and a nanny were the norm. No one ever asked the price of anything and everyone was always comparing where they were on ladder of success within the society. Lot's of whispering behind people's back if they thought you were slipping.

Not anymore. I have been rich, poor and middle class. I like to think I can function at a high society charity dinner or dish out soup at a relief kitchen with equal grace. I can talk to my business customers about the artistic merits of the Palace of Versailles and I can dig the holes to plant the trees.

Given a choice I would choose to be comfortable middle class. You have a sense of appreciation for what you've worked for without the stress of wondering if you will able to afford a roof over your head and food on the table. Rich is only good if you know how to share and not take yourself too seriously. It's think its hard for rich people to really appreciate things in our piggy society. Poverty just sucks.


No, it is human nature for some people to lead and others to follow. I always thought if Karl Marx had spent some time with Freud, and learned more about the human ego, he would have changed many of his theories about class and economics.

Re: Wanna talk about Class?


Grew up running from rental to rental, on food stamps for a while, until my parents got their business going a little bit and they bought a doublewide trailer in an isolated area with no children and cut off from the world by a busy country highway where you had to have a car to get anywhere.

There and elsewhere I've never felt like I fit in a "class," though once I left home I've been very aware of them. Accidents of history have terrible effects on people's lives, and I am eternally grateful that I had the good fortune not to have been born into worse circumstances. Many of the people before me lived in terrible circumstances.



A big part of me will never be anything but what I was when I grew up: a hillbilly kid with no television, great weather, and lots of room to roam. At the same time, my folks placed a huge value on my learning stuff, so I'm oddly educated and a big geek, so I find it difficult to relate to ambitious people because no one ever had a lot of material ambition (like most everyone around me) and to people who aren't, like, interested in weird stuff. (Even when my folks later got money and spent it it was listlessly, with no intelligence or forethought or real zeal.)

Most people I'm around have some sort of material ambition, some of them a lot of it.



No. You might get a false positive on that by relying on some familiar and limited definition of class, but I doubt there is any group of people who feel that their interaction with the group of people who influence their lives is without any sort of power-based interaction.

Lobotomized chimpanzees gravitate toward each other, even when trained observers can't tell them from the nonlobotomized ones. Similarly, the ambitious will always form groups to pick on the unambitious -- or, sometimes, the differently ambitious, if resources are limited (and they always are, somehow, and the distribution of luck usually favors one bunch over another). The unambitious will similarly continue to find ways to discriminate amongst ourselves.





Was that a dire pronouncement? Don't worry, I don't have any references.

On a serious note, I grew up in a military family, with Dad being a relatively senior officer, while both Mom's and Dad's immediate families were moderately prominent, more-than-just-comfortably-well-to-do, as well as fairly well-connected politically, and my "growing up" was mostly in the '50s, so there was a sorta class thing going on there to some extent, and of course I was aware of it, but I pretty much didn't play into it - a circumstance which occasioned not a little dismay among my elders. I've always kinda leaned toward taking folks for what their words and deeds show them to be, regardless who or what they purport to be, and I've never had much use for folks who show they consider themselves "better" than anyone.

I live in a rural area now - have for many years - and I love it; a more accepting, outgoing, downright nice-and-freindly, always eager to help, "egalitarian" society hardly may be imagined - even if some of them might have no idea what the word "egalitarian" means.


Well except for looney old Olaf - but nobody likes him ... been that way since FDR was President, from what I understand. Still, ain't nobody shot the sumbitch.

Re: Wanna talk about Class?


I do. I find it a fascinating subject.



I grew up probably lower-middle-class. Pretty stable, but not a lot of money by any means. Things like my parents had a lot of recipes featuring cow tongue because it was the cheapest kind of meat. I went to a pointedly egalitarian elementary school, and was friends with people from a wide variety of classes/ backgrounds. My best friend in 4th through 6th grade was the daughter of a very famous writer (if I said who you'd go "ooh!") who lived in what I now realize was an extremely expensive, gorgeous Victorian, but which was just her house to me, (if nicer than my house). My best friend in 1st through 3rd grade was much poorer than me, with a single mother on welfare. Etc.

I do think that America has a class system as much as we try to deny it, but that said it was shocking to live in London for a while and see the overt class systems there. I lived with a British family made up of a mother, father, and college-age daughter. She was in some ways transcending class, going to Cambridge despite humble origins. Her Cambridge boyfriend though was high-born and a right parody of poshness. I couldn't resist teasing him because it was just so amazing to me, and he didn't take it well at ALL. We all had dinner together a few times and he was constantly commenting on what terrible table manners Americans have, etc., etc. The whole thing (not just him, a lot of other stuff I saw too) was a real eye-opener.



Well, that's touchy. At least economically we're probably edging into at least upper-middle, and I have decidedly mixed feelings about that. See my dinner party thread for some of that. On one level I want to figure out the lay of the land, on the other hand I get rebellious. (I'll be as gauche as I wanna be, dammit.) One big thing I think about is sozlet, how she'll grow up. We purposely rejected a suburb where all the cool professors live because it was just so damn... rich. Beemers in the HS parking lot, etc. I just don't want sozlet to grow up that way. The place we chose is a lot more diverse, both economically and culturally.



Nope.

We're running up against that with the wife's work. The people are kind of a side show to me, but she's got to see them a lot more. Their money buys them influence and prestige in that world, and I just don't see the need to accord it to them. Of course, I don't have to be there everyday and be expected to buy into it.

We, in Australia have no class.

I was raised upper middle for about four minutes as a child, and lived through decades of unemployment and illness. What can I say, I've been middle class for minutes at a time with serious highpoints - not nothing, real high points - and rather immense despond. I could be poster child for the class swing, back and forth, back and forth. Some may see me not as ms. sunshine, but ms. sardonic, which is closer.

I'd say class equals morass for me. I'm fairly well educated with low income, not elaborating the reasons for that. I relate all across the board.

In Virginia, land was the mark of the upper echelon, and that had to be property that was passed down from generation to generation. As far as status is concerned, Vance Packard summed it up rather well:

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/packard.html

There are those who feel that the accumulation of wealth is the most important thing in life, but we in America must understand that our paper money is just fiat money, and is only backed by GNP, since FDR took us off the gold standard.

Creative people live in a different world, I think, and so many throughout history have paid a dear price for that particular difference.

Perhaps I am making a sweeping generalization, but it has been my experience that many folks compensate for basic insecurity or childhood poverty, by the figures in a bank account.

In my family, the level of education was the mark of "class" also.

Incidentally, leaders don't necessarily come from opulence.