3.

So if class isn’t directly tied to wealth, what is it tied to?

Attitudes.  Beliefs.  Behavior.

When I was growing up in my nice middle-class suburb this didn’t really register, because I didn’t see much of anyone who wasn’t middle class.  There was a range from lower middle class to upper middle class, with a few aberrations (like my own family) in the mix, but it was a pretty narrow range.

Then I went off to college and met honest-to-God members of the upper class, like the Vanderbilt girls, and the kids of nouveau-riche arrivistes, like Wendell Colson (Chuck Colson’s kid, before and during the Watergate scandal), and European aristocracy, like Jan Stoeckenius, and ghetto kids, like Iago (whose real name was Joachim, but he had passed for Hispanic in order to survive on the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant), and old-line Southern aristocracy — damn, what was that guy’s name?

Anyway, it was an eye-opening experience — but still limited, because after all, this was Princeton.  These were all Ivy Leaguers, regardless of their backgrounds — they were all bright and motivated and believed in the value of education, in one form or another.

Then I flunked out and lived in the slums of Pittsburgh for a year and a half — in South Oakland, to be exact, near Panther Hollow.  Where I got to meet lots of traditional working-class folks, the kind of people who would never think of sending a kid to Princeton.  And I also got to meet slum kids who weren’t bright and ambitious, like Iago; instead they included thieves and drug dealers and hustlers, and welfare cheats and day laborers and assorted others.  No actual pimps or whores, though — a gap in my education that still lingers.

After that I spent nine years in Kentucky — six in Lexington, which was midwestern suburban with a definite class structure unlike anything I’d seen in New England, and three in Dry Fork, up in the hills.  Hill folk weren’t quite like anything else I’d seen.

And finally we wound up in Maryland, in the suburbs of Washington, where the accepted wisdom is that it’s all race that matters, not class — which is bullshit.

And somewhere in there, it registered that it’s attitude that matters, not money.

Specifically, I think it’s attitudes about money, about work, about possessions, about status, about displays of wealth, and about class that define class.

So let me consider those attitudes.

First, about money:  Is it important?

If you’re lower class, money is important, but it’s a transient phenomenon, one you can’t control; sometimes you have money and sometimes you don’t, and it’s better to have it than not, but you can’t really do anything to ensure you’ll have it.  You can work, but that’s really slow, and eventually you’ll get fired or laid off or the paycheck will bounce.  You can steal, but you never know how much you’ll get, and it could get you jailed or killed.  Sometimes money will just come to you out of nowhere — a lottery win, an unexpected high-paying temp job, a generous friend — but it won’t stay, because it’ll all go for rent or clothes or utility bills or medical expenses.

Money’s untrustworthy stuff.  You know that some people seem to be able to accumulate so much of it it’s not a problem for them, but you don’t understand how that works.  Money is luck.

If you’re working class, money is why you work.  It pays the bills.  You save a little when you can, put it in the bank, and hope it’ll cover retirement — or at least car repairs and medical bills.  It’s important, but you don’t really like it or care about it all that much.  It’s fuel.

If you’re middle class, especially upper middle class, money is desperately important; you usually have enough, and when you don’t you have credit, but you’re always in debt and have to watch out not to go too far into debt, because you need to spend money to maintain your lifestyle and that spending doesn’t always match income.  Money is how you keep score.

If you’re upper class, money doesn’t matter.  It’s nice to have, but it’s not anything to worry about.  You’ll always be able to get more if it runs out, and of course you know how to save and invest, so it probably won’t ever really run out.  Money gets you things you like but don’t need.  Money’s a toy.

If you’re an intellectual, money’s a tool.  If you’re a pseudointellectual or a social climber (which are two faces of the same coin), it’s a weapon.

There are other categories, other classes, but I think that’ll do for now.

2:

When I was a kid, I didn’t think much about class.

This was partly because I was growing up in a quiet New England town where it wasn’t much of an issue. Pretty much the entire town was white middle-class folks.

I think I was also just a little slow to pick up on some of this stuff. I was in high school before it really registered that there were any ethnic divisions in town, for example. (The major division was Catholic/other; the Catholics then subdivided into Irish and Italian, and the others mostly into Armenian and Yankee, with a scattering of Jews, blacks, and other oddities (like an Argentine family I knew) who usually-but-not-always got counted with the Yankees.)

(If you’re not from New England it may seem weird that the small minorities got counted as old-line Yankees, but they did. Hard to explain if you aren’t familiar with New England attitudes, but it basically comes down to Yankees thinking of themselves as “everybody else,” the default, not part of a specific group, so that any isolated families, too small to constitute their own group, got included.)

(And all the divisions were very low-key, in any case.)

Anyway, I didn’t think about it much, and more or less accepted the “classless society” contention. In the 1950s that was more or less the official doctrine, at least in New England. That was what Sheckley’s story was mocking — and really, it was reading that story when I was about thirteen that I first began to understand that the U.S. is not classless, that even my hometown wasn’t. There’d been evidence before that, but it hadn’t really registered with me.

I was a little slow.

I’d known that my own family was considered a little weird, but I hadn’t thought of it in terms of class. In fact, I still didn’t think of it in class terms for years; if you asked me what class we were, I’d have said middle class without giving it much thought; going by income and status, that’s more or less correct. Going by other markers, it isn’t.

When I read Fussell’s Class — well, when I skimmed it, really, as I didn’t read it through — I concluded that we were “X-class.” After all, my father was a college professor, which seemed to fit, and we were all a pretty brainy bunch.

Except that when I was at Princeton I met some real X-class people. Again, it took me awhile to realize this, and to notice that the fact that they were not much like me and mine, and to draw any conclusion from that.

I also met real upper-class people.

It took awhile, but it eventually sank in that in a lot of ways I fit better with the upper class.

Oh, not perfectly. For one thing, my family didn’t have enough money anymore for me to have the full set of upper-class attitudes. But it began to seem as if any time I heard a discussion of class attitudes, I’d react to the upper-class position with, “Well, yeah, of course,” and the others with, “That’s dumb.”

I dunno, maybe I’m just a poseur. This is one of those things where it’s really hard to say; class is so nebulous in America. But there are things that I’d just thought of as normal that, well… aren’t.

Like the fact that we owned a mansion.

I mean, it’s not a very big mansion, and because of where it is it’s worth less than the suburban split level I live in now, but still, it’s a mansion. My great-great grandfather built it around 1840. It’s been rented out since 1939.

And there are other legacies still in the family. I have books on my office shelves that have been in the family for 150 years; there’s an Oriental rug in the basement that’s been in use for ninety. There’s a set of eighty-year-old hand-blown Carder Steuben dessert ware in the kitchen.

That’s just some of the stuff I walked off with; most of the family heirlooms wound up with my younger sisters.

And then there’s the fact that I went to Princeton. Which was not accomplished on the basis of grades; mine were okay, and my SAT scores were excellent, and I had some other stuff going for me, but the reason I was accepted is that my father went to Princeton, and his father.

It took me the longest time to realize that most people’s grandfathers didn’t go to college anywhere, let alone the Ivy League.

Let alone grandmothers. Mine went to Smith. Seven Sisters, rather than Ivy League, but for the Class of 1901 the Ivy League was all-male.

So it gradually sank in that my family had been upper class once.

They weren’t fabulously wealthy or anything; the family fortune was about a million and a half at the start of the 20th century. Uninflated 1900 dollars, so that was definitely rich, but we were never in Rockefeller’s league. Most of it went in the 1929 crash, though, and then when my father was orphaned he blew a big chunk of his inheritance putting himself through Princeton, getting a doctorate from Harvard, and buying a house straight out of grad school. Raising six kids took care of the rest; my share, when my mother died, came to about forty grand and a few shares of GM stock — and the mansion in Pennsylvania and a bunch of books and rugs and china and old photos and stuff.

So we weren’t rich. And for a long time I took for granted that that meant we weren’t upper class.

Except now I’ve reconsidered.

So just what do I mean by “class”?

No, I don’t mean wealth, though there’s certainly a correlation between money and class. I don’t mean ancestry or connections, either, though that, too, often comes into it.

Mostly, I see class as a collection of attitudes, values, and beliefs that determine part of both one’s own behavior and people’s reactions to that behavior.

Most of this is stuff learned in childhood, but some people do adopt as adults the attitudes and behaviors of a class other than the one they were born into. Interestingly, the people who deliberately try to do so often fail, and become objects of scorn — the nouveau riche, the gauche arriviste, the poseur…

(Hmm. Why are all those terms French? A question I might want to pursue later.)

There are those who maintain that the United States is a classless society. Shyeah, right. They’ve obviously never owned rental property, or worked in a factory, or pursued any number of other activities where one’s nose is rubbed vigorously in the class distinctions built into our culture.

Marxists don’t strike me as being a whole lot more in touch with reality, with their simplistic division into workers, rulers, and bourgeoisie and the traits they assign to those groups.

Someone named Paul Fussell wrote a book entitled Class back in the ’80s that described a pretty straightforward scale, top to bottom, not unlike the Marxist model, but acknowledging that there are finer gradations than Marx included. Unfortunately, he kept tripping over exceptions, people who didn’t fit his standard scheme, and he lumped these into what he called the “X-class,” roughly equivalent to what Marxists called the intelligentsia. All in all, I think his scheme has some problems.

And there was a Robert Sheckley story written back in the ’50s (when Sheckley was really good) set in a satirical American future where everything was suburbanized, and everybody was middle class. Of course, some of them were upper middle class and some were middle middle class and some were lower middle class…

Anyway, I don’t have a nice clear description of neat categories that everyone fits in. The lines get very blurry, and there are exceptions everywhere — you can’t point to any occupation and say, “Everyone who does this job is working class,” or whatever. You can’t define a class in terms of money or background without stumbling over a zillion exceptions.

But there are traits I see as upper class, others I see as middle class or working class or lower class. I want to address some of those.

And I want to discuss my own background as my first example, so that’ll be in Part 2.

Back in 2001, I posted a bunch of mini-essays about class in the United States in my newsgroup on SFF Net — six of them in all, though I’d originally planned on seven to nine; I got distracted before I finished.

I’m planning to repost them here, somewhat edited and updated, as much for my own amusement as anything else, but I welcome comments.

I don’t have a hard and fast schedule for when they’ll appear here, but I thought I’d let any readers know they’re coming.

Today is Wednesday — well, it was until twenty minutes ago, anyway — and Wednesday is new comic book day, so I drove over to the mall and made my weekly stop at Beyond Comics, where I picked up half a dozen titles.

And while I was doing that, I came to a dismaying realization that I mentioned to the shop manager, who agreed: There are writers working in comics today who used to be on my must-buy list, but who now are getting me to drop titles I used to buy.

Exiles, for example — I started buying it with #10, and never missed an issue until Chris Claremont took over writing it. Three issues later I’d dropped it, and now it’s cancelled. Once upon a time I really liked Claremont’s writing.

Or there’s Peter David on She-Hulk. To be fair, David said he was going to revamp the book because he just didn’t know how to continue it the way Dan Slott did it, and I respect that — but I don’t enjoy what he did with it at all, and dropped it after two issues.

And Paul Dini — I used to love pretty much everything Paul Dini wrote, but I find his run on Detective Comics tedious. I mean, this ought to be an amazing match-up, Dini and Detective, but it just doesn’t work for me.

Not that Grant Morrison on Batman is any better — I mean, Damian was a really bad idea. But then, I’d already been disillusioned with Morrison when he was writing the X-Men — he started well there, but lost me after maybe eight or ten issues.

I could go on to name other examples, but I think the point is made — these are all writers I thought were great fun when I first encountered them, but who are now writing stuff I really don’t want to read. It’s not just mediocre — if I’m reading a title I can put up with a lot of mediocre before I quit — but so unlike what had gone before, and unlike it in a bad way, that I actively avoid it. Claremont killed everything I liked about Exiles; David systematically removed everything I liked about She-Hulk. I’d stuck with Exiles through a lot of writers, ranging from frankly bad to really good, but Claremont chased me away in short order.

And then there are one-time favorites I’ve been actively avoiding for awhile now — Dave Sim, Warren Ellis, Frank Miller, Steve Gerber…

So why is this? I mean, there are lots of writers I still like just fine, but there are also all these writers I can’t stand anymore. And I can’t think of a single long-time comics writer who I think is getting better, which is kind of depressing.

I don’t have any brilliant insights here; I just wanted to rant a bit. I would love to see an old favorite get even better; instead I’m seeing lots of them go bad. I am not happy about that. The universe is being mean to me.

Make it stop.