Hugh reviews Class by Paul Fussell, new poetry from William, and someone spots a fella.
Icon(s)o(f)clas(t)s
Class: A Guide Through the American Status System by Paul Fussell
(nonfiction review by Hugh Boone)
Of the many divisions scouring the American social fabric, class has yet to pierce the television talking points or dinner table chitchat. We don’t know it, even when we see it. To be defined, and thus hindered or promoted, by the ineffable and indistinct is to understand a nuance in this age of gross dichotomizing.
Paul Fussell’s Class reads as a social surgeon’s dissection of the American status hierarchy. He tiers our class structure nine ways, ascending in ease and freedom of volition, to do as one will, controlled by as few as possible. The uppermost individual, the prime “Upper Out-of-Sight”, is a person whose vast inherited wealth yields a power so great they are immune to the influence of it from anywhere else, and crucially, by the demands of wielding it. Obligation and burden belong only to the stooping backs of those lower down.
Their opposite is the institutionalized destitute. A prisoner in permanent isolation, refused even the release of execution.
Between are the squabbling, jabbering, clambering hordes entrenching their status position on one front whilst scrambling desirously upwards on the other. That’s you and me.That his demarcations were authored in 1980 and remain immediately recognizable to the modern reader is a testament to both Fussell’s clairvoyance and the slow troddle of social change. People magazine remains a table-top waiting room staple for the intellectually devoid. Daytime soaps play for those disinclined or even unable to read. Horoscopes lie beyond the status pale.
The markers of class detailed are only those that “reflect choice”. Most noticeable are the hundreds of silent signals sent from in and around the house (or “home” if you’re a High Prole). To broach the class implications of race, ethnicity, identity, or orientation is too severe for the sensibilities of the target general reader. This omission allows for piercing inducements to self-conscious laughter, tempered always with a cringe.
To apply class as a lens in explaining human behavior, particularly during a global glut of debt-financed conspicuous consumption - eyes on you, new truck and SUV owners - is to reveal the aspirational migration from Proledom to the venerated heights of the Upper Middle Class. It is to see much of the Radnor Hunt as a costume party for insecure adults. To see Manhattan “Derby Parties” as lower still. To understand the freedom granted by generational wealth, in a curious parallel to the security of tradespeople and craftsmen so few parents want their children to become. Much preferred is the white-collar wage slavery of the contemporary graduate. Class is a mirror to holdup and inspect choices that once seemed unique to oneself. They weren’t. Have a read, have a laugh, then have a cry.
Fussell could not foresee the class implications of the internet. Using his lessons, I’ll have a go.
By its very nature, the internet is too useful to be enjoyed by Uppers and Upper Out-of-Sights. Memes, videos, and social media are too escapist, and thus made for the Middles and Proles who seek a momentary pause from the dreary repetitions of their daily dance. No chance of asking the conductor for a change of tune.
Middles are those “things are done to”, and as revel in the illusory hedonism offered by a Chrome incognito tab. The destitute Lowers and Bottom Out of Sights are limited to a thirty-minute public library connection, or don’t have access at all. Uppers have others manage anything requiring digital attention: banking, travel, shopping, email. Self-service by definition is an imposition, fiat accompli, onto the subservient middle masses.
Upper Middles go online, but never surf, as required. They prefer reading or the company of others for their entertainment. Those below, due to the time demands of work and (then) family, can’t do either. At the very top, Windows XP runs uninterrupted and unsupported. At the very bottom are payment plan smartphones streaming YouTube with no headphones.
Amidst the harmless fun of tiering ourselves and neighbors alike, no different than a sorority rush and much more symptom than cause our need to stratify up and down, Fussell speaks to several topics which otherwise are suffocated in the anxious pause after their introduction. He adroitly ties class anxiety with the irruption, and numerical eruption, of “Colleges” and “Universities” - quotes intentional - offering undergraduate degrees in name only. He is the progenitor of a line of thinking culminating in Excellent Sheep, which address the insane weight of undergraduate study in accounting for social reverence and prestige.
Secondary education is the final conspicuous marker of class that roughly parallels with historical hierarchies. Even though the Ivies and its peers were largely attended by leading, local families and not the summit of the global testing pyramid, the identity capital of degrees at one of the most elite twenty universities is a lifetime pass, in a single but sweeping regard, to status elevation.
How much teenage angst is actually a perceptive reading of what is at stake for the graduating senior, and the shrinking odds they’ll reach what they see as the last patch of social safety in a torrent of bit-part, part-time, precarious gig and service work? Parents too must be in on the secret, which further winds the crank on the rack of expectations.
Fussell never conflates class position with personal worth. The Lyft driver is no less a person than whoever is being driven (Although one cannot escape seeing ridesharing as a clumsy reenactment of limousine conventions. Fussell would further note that only Middles say ‘limousine’; Uppers simply call for a ‘car’.) Yet collectively, the Prole and Middle masses sink our culture. Their, Our?, Your., flight from complexity and nuance to the safety of simple tropes and fast-food thinking finances more and more of that same swill. “Prole Drift” is the trend within all industrialized society to move towards the tastes and purchasing preferences of our largest common denominator. Attention is just too lucrative to ignore.
Forty years ago, Prole Drift was seen as newspapers began to print horoscopes, bestseller lists determined book sales, and canned tourism replaced genuine travel. Today that same drift continues unabated into streaming services, mobile games, kidult entertainment, movies written (hardly) for a worldwide audience, and the growing Cult of the Visual that requires every written story to be accompanied by photographs of the material described.
These same platforms do help to percolate subcultures unique to anything prior, and otherwise unable to survive without modern crowdfunding and digital access. But culturally, en masse, we’re up to the neck in aesthetic sludge. Scorsese doesn’t think Marvel movies are cinema? Of course they aren’t. They’re children’s stories for maladapted adults and the global illiterate. But Martin should take a peek at his own latest effort, The Irishman. Adapting a nonfiction book for the screen is another shunt of prole drift. Those billion dollars in the box office were all a choice away from the more detailed and intricate written account. It seems we need Joe Pesci to put on prosthetics for nonfiction to be, what is the most dispiriting of modern requirements, accessible.
Fussell concludes with the compelling offer of an exit from the shackles of our own personal status station. His book describes with scientific taxonomy the envy, pretension, effort, and cash-for-cachet exchange we (almost) all trudge forward through each day, propagating with visible resonance. Ours is a cross we cannot bear without adornments to deceive others. The only liberation is in casting it aside. To do so is to join the swelling numbers of class ‘X’: no superhero reference, you can be sure.
Long Distance
(new poetry from William Shears)
We keep having these
Celestial engagements.
Crossing pathways, like
Meteors, shining with
Astral contact.
These transitory dawns, I think
Are explosive moments,
That sing of emotive levity.
Of anxious brevity,
And luminescent amity.
Before we ricochet away
To our inky wells
of Isolated gravity.
About and Out
He is a creature of unconquerable excess. A vibrant teal and fuchsia hoodie is zipped halfway. Just enough to hide a belly, but not the healthy scrawl of chest hair. His grey sweatpants are stained from a lifetime of sin and retribution. These then tuck neatly into white hi-top socks, together in shoes dyed red with, presumably, the blood of enemies. Each foot points planted with all the weight and wisdom of a great redwood, one to the macadam and one to a stone storefront façade.
A puff of cigarillo smoke obscures all but the paunch and jowl of a bulldog, unmistakable even in silhouette. Dark eyes sit wide in their recesses. But his hair is carefully trimmed tight on the sides. Up until a shock of black mohawk on top, thinning slightly at the front, trailing backwards into a long ponytail. A mullet-hawk, if you will. As he did.
Briefly, we lock eyes. I give him a nod, and he returns the gesture before stuffing out his smoke on a nearby sign reading: “Treat your body like you live in it.”