Actually, you reveal a great deal about your social class by the amount of annoyance or fury you feel when the subject is brought up. A tendency to get very anxious suggests that you are middle-class and nervous about slipping down a rung or two. On the other hand, upper-class people love the topic to come up: the more attention paid to the matter the better off they seem to be. Proletarians generally don’t mind discussions of the subject because they know they can do little to alter their class identity. Thus the whole class matter is likely to seem like a joke to them—the upper classes fatuous in their empty aristocratic pretentiousness, the middles loathsome in their anxious gentility. It is the middle class that is highly class-sensitive, and sometimes class-scared to death.
If you reveal your class by your outrage at the very topic, you reve At the bottom, wale tend to believe that class is defined by the amount of money you have. In the middle, people grant that money has something to do with it, but think education and the kind of work you do almost equally important. Nearer the top, people perceive that taste, values, ideas, style, and behavior are indispensable criteria of class, regardless of money or occupation or education.
The reason is that the United States is preeminently the venue of newcomers, with a special need to place themselves advantageously and to get on briskly. “Some newcomers,” says Quinton, “are geographical, that is, immigrants; others are economic, the newly rich; others again chronological, the young.” All are faced with the problem inseparable from the operations of a mass society, earning respect.
The rewards … in this life are esteem and admiration of others-the punishments are neglect and contempt. … The desire of the esteem of others is as real a want of nature as hunger—and the neglect and contempt of the world as severe a pain as the gout or stone.
About the same time the Irish poet Thomas Moore, sensing the special predicament Americans were inviting with their egalitarian Constitution, described the citizens of Washington, D.C., as creatures:
Born to be slaves, and struggling to be lords.
Nowhere do citizens appear so insignificant as in a democratic nation. Nowhere, consequently, is there more strenuous effort to achieve—earn would probably not be the right word-significance.
In the United States, where the form of government promotes a condition (or at least an illusion) of uniformity among the citizens, one of the unique anxieties is going to be the constant struggle for individual self-respect based upon social approval. That is, where everybody is somebody, nobody is anybody. In a recent Louis Harris poll, “respect from others” is what 76 percent of respondents said they wanted most.
Create a rich, warm, sensual allusion to your own good taste that will demand respect and consideration in every setting you care to imagine.
“In democratic times,” he granted, “enjoyments are more intense than in the ages of aristocracy, and the number of those who partake in them is vastly larger.” But, he added, in egalitarian atmospheres “man’s hopes and desires are oftener blasted, the soul is more stricken and perturbed, and care itself more keen.”
Pushed far enough, class envy issues in revenge egalitarianism: “Democracy demands that all of its citizens begin the race even. Egalitarianism insists that they all finish even.”
Despite our public embrace of political and judicial equality, in individual perception and understanding —much of which we refrain from publicizing-we arrange things vertically and insist on crucial differences in value. Regardless of what we say about equality, I think everyone at some point comes to feel like the Oscar Wilde who said, “The brotherhood of man is not a mere poet’s dream: it is a most depressing and humiliating reality.” It’s as if in our heart of hearts we don’t want agglomerations but distinctions. Analysis and separation we find interesting, synthesis boring.
“Since we are bound… to have classes in any case, why not have them in the more organic, heterogeneous and variegated fashion” indigenous to the West? And since we have them, why not know as much as we can about them? The subject may be touchy, but it need not be murky forever.
How many classes are there? The simplest answer is that there are only two, the rich and the poor, employer and employed, landlord and tenant, bourgeois and proletariat. Or, to consider manners rather than economics and politics, there are gentlemen and there are cads.
A way of bringing home that soldier’s conclusion is to realize that all work everywhere is divided into two sorts, safe and dangerous.
All the clichés and pleasant notions of how the old class divisions have disappeared are exposed as hollow phrases by the simple fact that American workers must accept serious injury and even death as part of their daily reality while the middle class does not.
Imagine… the universal outcry that would occur if every year several corporate headquarters routinely collapsed like mines, crushing sixty or seventy executives. Or suppose that all the banks were filled with an invisible noxious dust that constantly produced cancer in the managers, clerks, and tellers. Finally, try to imagine the horror. . . if thousands of university professors were deafened every year or lost fingers, hands, sometimes eyes, while on their jobs.
One that cuts deeply across the center of society and that will poison life here for generations, is the one separating those whose young people were killed or savaged in the Vietnam War and those who, thanks largely to the infamous S-2 deferment for college students, escaped.
This three-tiered conception is the usual way to think of the class system for people in the middle, for it offers them moral and social safety, positioning them equally distant from the vices of pride and snobbery and waste and carelessness, which they associate with those above them, and dirtiness, constraint, and shame, the attendants of those below. Upper, middle, and lower are the customary terms for these three groups, although the British euphemism working class for lower class is now making some headway here.
Not that the three classes at the top don’t have money. The point is that money alone doesn’t define them, for the way they have their money is largely what matters. That is, as a class indicator the amount of money is less significant than the source. The main thing distinguishing the top three classes from each other is the amount of money inherited in relation to the amount currently earned. The top-out-of-sight class (Rockefellers, Pews, DuPonts, Mellons, Fords, Vanderbilts) lives on inherited capital entirely. No one whose money, no matter how copious, comes from his own work-film stars are an example-can be a member of the top-out-of-sight class, even if the size of his income and the extravagance of his expenditure permit him to simulate identity with it. Inheritance-“old money” in the vulgar phrase-is the indispensable principle defining the top three classes, and it’s best if the money’s been in the family for three or four generations.
Hence the name of the top class, which could just as well be called “the class in hiding.” Their houses are never seen from the street or road. They like to hide away deep in the hills or way off on Greek or Caribbean islands (which they tend to own), safe, for the moment, from envy and its ultimate attendants, confiscatory taxation and finally expropriation. It was the Great Depression that badly frightened the very rich, teaching them to be “discreet, almost reticent, in exhibiting their wealth.”
In his day the rich delighted to exhibit themselves conspicuously, with costly retainers and attendants much in evidence. Now they hide, not merely from envy and revenge but from exposé journalism, much advanced in cunning and ferocity since Veblen’s time, and from an even worse threat, virtually unknown to Veblen, foundation mendicancy, with its hordes of beggars in three-piece suits constantly badgering the well-to-do. Showing off used to be the main satisfaction of being very rich in America. Now the rich must skulk and hide. It’s a pity.
Their very class tends to escape the down-to-earth calculations of sociologists and poll-takers and consumer researchers. It’s not studied because it’s literally out of sight, and a questionnaire proffered to a top-out-of-sight person will very likely be hurled to the floor with disdain. Very much, in fact, the way it would be ignored by a bottom-out-of-sight person. And it’s here that we begin to perceive one of the most wonderful things about the American class system-the curious similarity, if not actual brotherhood, of the top- and bottom-out-of-sights.
In aid of invisibility, members of both classes feel an equal anxiety to keep their names out of the papers. And they do not earn their money. They are given it and kept afloat not by their own efforts or merits but by the welfare machinery or the correctional system, the way the tops owe it all to their ancestors.
The next class down, the upper class, differs from the top-out-of-sight class in two main ways. First, although it inherits a lot of its money, it earns quite a bit too, usually from some attractive, if slight, work, without which it would feel bored and even ashamed. It’s likely to make its money by controlling banks and the more historic corporations, think tanks, and foundations, and to busy itself with things like the older universities, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Foreign Policy Association, the Committee for Economic Development, and the like, together with the executive branch of the federal government, and often the Senate. In the days when ambassadors were amateurs, they were selected largely from this class, very seldom from the top-out-of-sight. And secondly, unlike the top-out-of-sights, the upper class is visible, often ostentatiously so. Which is to say that the top-out-of-sights have spun off and away from Veblen’s scheme of conspicuous exhibition, leaving the mere upper class to carry on its former role.
The constant coming and going of “houseguests” is an all but infallible upper-class sign, implying as it does plenty of spare bedrooms to lodge them in and no anxiety about making them happy, what with all the drinks, food, games, parties, etc. It is among members of the upper class that you have to refrain from uttering compliments, which are taken to be rude, possessions there being of course beautiful, expensive, and impressive, without question. The paying of compliments is a middle-class convention, for this class needs the assurance compliments provide. In the upper class there’s never any doubt of one’s value, and it all goes without saying.
But it is, finally, by a characteristic the American upper class shares with all aristocracies that ye shall know them: their imperviousness to ideas and their total lack of interest in them. Their inattention to ideas is why Matthew Arnold calls them Barbarians, and he imputes their serenity specifically to their “never having had any ideas to trouble them.” Still, they are a nice class, and the life among them is comfortable and ample and even entertaining, so long as you don’t mind never hearing anyone saying anything intelligent or original.
We now come to the upper-middle class. It may possess virtually as much as the two classes above it. The difference is that it has earned most of it, in law, medicine, oil, shipping, real estate, or even the more honorific kinds of trade, like buying and selling works of art. Although they may enjoy some inherited money and use inherited “things” (silver, Oriental rugs), the upper-middles suffer from a bourgeois sense of shame, a conviction that to live on the earnings of others, even forebears, is not quite nice.
This class is also the most “role-reversed” of all: men think nothing of cooking and doing house-work, women of working out of the house in journalism, the theater, or real estate.
The vast popularity of these two products suggests the appeal of the upper-middle style to all Americans who don’t possess it. Indeed, most people of the middle classes and below would rather be in the upper-middle class than even the upper or the top-out-of-sight. Being in the upper-middle class is a familiar and credible fantasy: its usages, while slightly grander than one’s own, are recognizable and compass-able, whereas in the higher classes you might be embarrassed by not knowing how to eat caviar or use a finger bowl or discourse in French. It’s a rare American who doesn’t secretly want to be upper-middle class.
The ideal is for everyone in business to look upper-middle-class, because upper-middle-class equals Success.
Indeed, it seems a general principle that no high-class person can live in any place associated with religious prophecy or miracle, like Mecca, Bethlehem, Fatima, Lourdes, or Salt Lake City. It’s notable that the most civilized places-London, Paris, Antibes, and even New York-pass safely through this test, although by the strictest application of the rule, Rome is a little doubtful. Still, classier than Jerusalem.
The middle class is distinguishable more by its earnestness and psychic insecurity than by its middle income. I have known some very rich people who remain stubbornly middle-class, which is to say they remain terrified at what others think of them, and to avoid criticism are obsessed with doing everything right. The middle class is the place where table manners assume an awful importance and where net curtains flourish to conceal activities like hiding the salam’ (a phrase no middle-class person would indulge in, surely: the fatuous making love is the middle-class equivalent). The middle class, always anxious about offending, is the main market for “mouthwashes,” and if it disappeared the whole “deodorant” business would fall to the ground.
Hence the middles’ need to accumulate credit cards and take in The New Yorker, which it imagines registers upper-middle taste. Its devotion to that magazine, or its ads, is a good example of Mills’s description of the middle class as the one that tends “to borrow status from higher elements.” New Yorker advertisers have always known this about their audience, and some of their pseudo-upper-middle gestures in front of the middles are hilarious, like one recently flogging expensive stationery, here, a printed invitation card.
IBM and DuPont hire these people from second-rate colleges and teach them that they are nothing if not members of the team.
“One who makes birth or wealth the sole criterion of worth”: that’s a conventional dictionary definition of a snob, and the place to look for the snob is in the middle class. Worried a lot about their own taste and about whether it’s working for or against them, members of the middle class try to arrest their natural tendency to sink downward by associating themselves, if ever so tenuously, with the imagined possessors of money, power, and taste. “Correctness” and doing the right thing become obsessions, prompting middle-class people to write thank-you notes after the most ordinary dinner parties, give excessively expensive or correct presents, and never allude to any place-Fort Smith, Arkansas, for example-that lacks known class. It will not surprise readers who have traveled extensively to hear that Neil Mackwood, a British authority on snobbery, finds the greatest snobs worldwide emanating from Belgium, which can also be considered world headquarters of the middle class.
The desire to belong, and to belong by some mechanical act like purchasing something, is another sign of the middle class. Words like club and guild (as in Book-of-the-Month Club and Literary Guild) extend a powerful invitation.
If the women treasure “friendliness,” the men treasure having a genteel occupation (usually more important than money), with emphasis on the word (if seldom the thing) executive.
For the middle-class man is scared. He is always somebody’s man, the corporation’s, the government’s, the army’s…
Because he is essentially a salesman, the middle-class man develops a salesman’s style. Hence his optimism and his belief in the likelihood of self-improvement if you’ll just hurl yourself into it.
If you want to know who reads John T. Molloy’s books, hoping to break into the upper-middle class by formulas and mechanisms, they are your answer. You can see them on airplanes especially, being forwarded from one corporate training program to another.
The special anxiety of the high proles is fear about loss or reduction of status: you’re proud to be a master carpenter, and you want the world to understand clearly the difference between you and a laborer. The special anxiety of the mid-proles is fear of losing the job. And of the low proles, the gnawing perception that you’re probably never going to make enough or earn enough freedom to have and do the things you want.
One way to ascertain whether a person is middle-class or high-prole is to apply the principle that the wider the difference between one’s working clothes and one’s “best,” the lower the class.
But high proles are quite smart, or at least shrewd. Because often their work is not closely supervised, they have pride and a conviction of independence, and they feel some contempt for those who have not made it as far as they have.
Like other aristocrats, says LeMasters, these “have gone to the top of their social world and need not expend time or energy on ‘social climbing.’” They are aristocratic in other ways, like their devotion to gambling and their fondness for deer hunting. Indeed, the antlers with which they decorate their interiors give their dwellings in that respect a resemblance to the lodges of the Scottish peerage. The high prole resembles the aristocrat too, as Ortega y Gasset notes, in “his propensity to make out of games and sports the central occupation of his life,” as well as in his unromantic attitude toward women.
Since they’re not consumed with worry about choosing the correct status emblems, these people can be remarkably relaxed and unself-conscious. They can do, say, wear, and look like pretty much anything they want without undue feelings of shame, which belong to their betters, the middle class, shame being largely a bourgeois feeling.
High proles are nice..It’s down among the mid- and low proles that features some might find offensive begin to show them-selves. These are the people who feel bitter about their work, often because they are closely supervised and regulated and generally treated like wayward children.
The degree of supervision, indeed, is often a more eloquent class indicator than mere income, which suggests that the whole class system is more a recognition of the value of freedom than a proclamation of the value of sheer cash. The degree to which your work is overseen by a superior suggests your real class more accurately than the amount you take home from it.
Constantly demeaned at work, the lower sorts of proles suffer from poor morale. As one woman worker says, “Most of us … have jobs that are too small for our spirit.”
…visiting relatives (most upper-middles and uppers, by contrast, are in flight from their relatives and visit friends instead).
If upper-class people marry downward, they tend to choose beauty only: “In general, good-looking people marry up… and the insecure and ugly tend to marry down.”
There’s an analogy here with the excessively washed and polished automobile, almost infallibly a sign of prole ownership. Class people can afford to drive dirty cars.
Despite appearances, I’m really as good as you are, and my ‘necktie,’ though perhaps unconventional, is really better than your traditional tie, because it suggests the primitive and therefore the unpretentious, pure, and virtuous.
What Veblen specified as the leisure class’s “veneration of the archaic” shows itself everywhere: in the popularity among the upper-middle class of attending opera and classical ballet; of sending its issue to single-sex prep schools, because more unregenerate and old-style than coed ones; of traveling to view antiquities in Europe and the Middle East; of studying the “humanities” instead of, say, electrical engineering, since the humanities involve the past and studying them usually results in elegiac emotions. Even the study of law has about it this attractive aura of archaism: there’s all that dog Latin, and the “cases” must all be rooted in the past. Classy people never deal with the future. That’s for vulgarians like traffic engineers, planners, and inventors.
Among mid- and low proles, the set will probably be found in the dining room or kitchen, wherever the family gathers for meals. This allows the TV to replace conversation entirely, which is why these classes depend upon it.
They do not like cats because the cat is free, and will never consent to become a slave. He will do nothing to your order, as the other animals do.
Thus the upper orders’ fondness for a species they can order about, like their caterers, gardeners, and lawyers, and one that fawns the more it’s commanded. “Sit! That’s a good boy.”
It says: “I am grand and desirable for two reasons: first, I used to drink heavily, and thus formerly was funny, careless, adventuresome, etc.; and second, I had the sense to give it up, and am thus both intelligent and disciplined. Further, I am at the moment your social superior, because, sober, I’m watching you get drunk, and I can assure you that you are a pathetic spectacle.”
Among upper-middles there’s a general belief that sliced bread is, ipso facto, horrible, although some allowance may be made for brands pleading a degree of archaism, like Arnold’s Brick Oven or Pepperidge “Farm.” Abroad is the magic notion here. Sometimes it seems that anything will be consumed so long as it’s not native.
And by frequenting a restaurant said to put out “gourmet” food, the middle class can play the game it loves most, pretending to be in the class above.
A woman executive secretary, a high-school graduate, told Studs Terkel: “I have dinner with businessmen and enjoy this very much. I like the background music in some of these restaurants. It’s soothing and it also adds a little warmth and doesn’t disturb the conversation. I like the atmosphere and the caliber of people that usually you see and run into. People who have made it.”
There it is in a horrible little nutshell. What makes that comment middle-class is that it never touches on the food, middle-class clients being drawn to restaurants largely by the arts of the decorator and the orchestra leader rather than the skill of the chef.
I think we could go to the Veblen who analyzes conspicuous expenditure in public. But the difference now is that it’s less the upper than the lower orders who, to fulfill their fantasies, are moved to exhibit their purchasing power, even early in the morning when the audience is minimal and bound to consist largely of other proles responding to the same ad.
The concept “weekend” has taken on largely middle-class or high-prole associations, betokening now the momentary freedom custom and the law oblige employers to grant their wage slaves.
It should hardly be necessary to indicate that for uppers, who do not have employers or perform steady work, the weekend is not a very meaningful concept, except as it indicates the days when the banks are closed.
Prole “summer” is never three months long, but two weeks, or at most, four. They summer at an attraction specially built for them, like the Disney fun parks, which they will, in a sense, “rent” while there and then relinquish. On the prole principle that the public knows what’s best, the prole will always go where others go, preferably to stand in line once he’s there.
As I’ve indicated elsewhere, in our day, travel has been reduced so entirely to tourism that one can hardly use the archaic and honorific term anymore except ironically. So I’ll call the activity tourism. All classes are its victims, but proles least of all, not so much because they can’t afford it as because they fear the new experiences they imagine it might offer. The wholly predictable is what they want, not the unexpected, and the irony is that the wholly predictable is exactly what tourism now provides.
They tend to choose experiences for their leisure “that have the power to affirm acquired wisdom rather than provide any confrontations with novel and possibly taxing matters.”
Fears of “being taken” combine with provincial ignorance of where one might go, smugness in concluding little elsewhere is really worth visiting, and preference for the hometown version of things.” These fears tend to limit prole trips to visits with relatives or drives to relatives’ funerals. When they do take a trip, they remember it for years and dwell on its details of meals, mileages, expenses, and motel luxuries.
Tourism is popular with the middle class because it allows them to “buy the feeling, if only for a short time, of higher status.”
For what the middle class most envies in the classes above is their trips abroad, more than their houses, cars, or other items of local conspicuous consumption. The envy is more than economic — it’s “cultural”: “Cultural superiority is symbolized by the uppers’ experiences of distant places, and the uppers’ habit of tripping” seems to say that the traveler is already comfortable in such settings or is in the process of becoming so.
Two motives urge middle-class and prole fans to obsession with their sports. One is their need as losers to identify with winners, the need to dance and scream “We’re number one!” while holding an index finger erect. In addition to this appeal through vicarious success, sports are popular for middles and proles to follow because they sanction a flux of pedantry, dogmatism, record-keeping, wise secret knowledge, and pseudo-scholarship of the sort usually associated with the “decision-making” or “executive” or “opinion-molding” classes.
The barroom or living-room debates occasioned by these events are a prole counterpart of the classy debates in statehouses and courthouses, and the shrewd weighing of evidence and thoughtful drawing of inferences ape the proceedings in the highest learned conferences and seminars.
Middles and proles like these catalogs too because if you buy from them instead of from a store you don’t risk being humiliated by some snotty clerk, and no one, not even the postman, knows what you’re buying. Catalog buying is the perfect way for the insecure and the hypersensitive and the socially uncertain to sustain their selfhood by accumulating goods. The things bought are not important things-indeed, almost everything offered in these catalogs is conspicuously unnecessary, except as a device to sustain the ego.
Among democratic nations, ambition is ardent and continual, but its aim is not habitually lofty; and life is generally spent in eagerly coveting small objects that are within reach.
The middle class is the main clientele for these catalogs, and the things they buy from them assure them of their value and support their aspirations.
All these “heraldic” and “clan” appurtenances register the depth and pathos of the feeling of unimportance which is the bugbear and stigma of the middle class. “They feel that they live in a time of big decisions, but they know that they are not making any.”
Nouveau riche is better than no riche at all.
Practically all that need be known about the psychological circumstances of the middle class is latent in the “Champagne Re-cork”. “This unusual stopper,” the catalog indicates, “keeps ‘bubbly’ sprightly, sparkling after uncorking ceremony is over. Gold electro-plated.” There you have it: at once the desire for grandeur and the need for prudence, the two contradictory motives at perpetual war in the hearts of those caught in the middle.
If the function of the middle-class housewife’s plaque is to assure her that her drudgery has value, the function of these plaques is to assert that God loves proles, which He doubtless does, although there seems no reason for constantly harping on it.
If personalizing isn’t absolutely indispensable to Americans, buying things from catalogs seems to be, not because they want the things but because they need to exercise the illusion of choice by buying them. Catalog buying delivers the illusion of power without the social risk of encounters with others who might dispute your power. The act of ordering unnecessary objects by mail is a new secret way of performing what Veblen calls “the conspicuously wasteful honorific expenditure that confers spiritual well-being.”
Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.
“In 1940 about 13 percent of college-age young people actually went to college; by 1970 it was about 43 percent.” But no. It was still about 13 percent, the other 30 percent attending things merely denominated col-leges. These poor kids and their parents were performing the perpetual American quest not for intellect but for respectability and status. That the number of young people really going to college will always be about 13 percent would seem to be the message of Edward Fiske’s “selective” findings.
The newly arrived, eager, upwardly mobile person, sweaty from his climb up the class ladder, wipes his brow and learns that the doors to full recognition and acceptance are still closed to him.
The process was analogous to the way high-school students are finally extruded to enter “college,” and for both processes one description can serve: unearned promotion. What was happening in the 1960s was simply an acceleration of a process normal in this country-inflation, hyperbole, bragging. Here it’s as natural for every college to want to be a university as for every employee to want to be an “executive,” and every executive a vice president.
What does it matter that no spirit of learning is visible in the place? What does it matter if curiosity and study are unknown there, or if the very idea of intellectual rigor and excellence makes people nervous and insecure?
The psychological damage wrought by this incessant struggle for status is enormous just because of the extraordinary power of these institutions to confer prestige. The number of hopes blasted and hearts broken for class reasons is probably greater in the world of colleges and universities than anywhere else.
The uppers don’t care what you think about their reading, and neither do the proles. The poor anxious middle class is the one that wants you to believe it reads “the best literature,” and condemnatory expressions like trash or rubbish are often on its lips. It is the natural audience for the unreadable second-rate pretentious books.
That last will remind us of the indispensability of cliché to middle-class understanding. Where the more fortunately educated read to be surprised, the middle class reads to have its notions confirmed, and deviations from customary verbal formulas disconcert and annoy it.
Elegance is the fatal temptation for the middle class, dividing it from the blunter usages of uppers and proles alike. Neither of these classes would warn against two people’s simultaneously pursuing the same project by speaking of “duplicity of effort.” The middle class is where you hear prestigious a lot, and to speculate about the reason it’s replaced distinguished or noted or respected in the past twenty years is to do a bit of national soul-searching.
The longer the euphemism the better. As a rule, euphemisms are longer than the words they replace. They have more letters, they have more syllables, and frequently, two or more words will be deployed in place of a single one. This is partly because the tabooed Anglo-Saxon words tend to be short and partly because it almost always takes more words to evade an idea than to state it directly and honestly.
On the pediment of the Supreme Court building are the words EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW. People secure in their reputation for seriousness, wisdom, and social adequacy would not have multiplied syllables but inscribed simply JUSTICE, having scrutinized the five extra syllables and perceived that all were implied in that one simple word. But being Americans, they were afraid someone would find them elemental and modest and thus socially unsatisfactory unless they canted it up.
“If my mother and father argued,” he reports, “my mother went around shutting down the windows because they didn’t want the neighbors to hear ‘em. But they [i.e., the lower sort of proles] deliberately open the doors and open the windows, screaming and hollering. … “ The prole must register his existence and his presence in public.
If each class has one word it responds to uniquely, the upper class probably likes secure or liquid best. The word of the upper-middle class is right, as in doing the right thing: “I do want everything right for Muffy’s wedding.” The middle class likes right too, but the word that really excites the middles is luxury (“Those beautiful luxury one-room apartments”). Spotless (floors, linens, bowels, etc.) is also a middle-class favorite. High proles are suckers for easy-easy terms, six easy lessons. And the word of the classes below is free: “We never go to anything that’s not free,” as the low-prole housewife said.
Lesbians, on the contrary, like to sink, dropping from middle-class status to become taxi drivers, police officers, and construction workers. The ultimate male-homosexual social dream is to sit at an elegant dinner table, complete with flowers and doilies and finger bowls, surrounded by rich, successful, superbly suited and gowned, witty, and cleverly immoral people. The ultimate lesbian social dream is to pack it in at some matey lunch counter with the heftier proles, wearing work clothes and doing a lot of shouting and kidding.
If people with small imaginations and limited understandings aspire to get into the upper-middle class, the few with notable gifts of mind and perception aspire to disencumber themselves into X people. It’s only as an X, detached from the constraints and anxieties of the whole class racket, that an American can enjoy something like the LIBERTY promised on the coinage. And it’s in the X world, if anywhere, that an American can avoid some of the envy and ambition that pervert so many.