class a guide through the american status system

Then, moving up, mahogany is, if you like, 'upper-middle-class', until we arrive, finally, at the apex: teak.ĭestitutes and bottom-out-of-sights eat dinner at 5:30, for the prole staff which takes care of them wants to clean up and be out roller skating or bowling early in the evening.

Desks made of oak are at the bottom, and those of walnut are next. Those who sell executive desks and related office furniture know that they and their clients agree on a rigid 'class' hierarchy. Members of the middle class will sometimes hope to mitigate the vulgarity of bright-red flowers by planting them in a rotting wheelbarrow or rowboat displayed on the front lawn, but seldom with success. Declassed also are phlox, zinnias, salvia, gladioli, begonias, dahlias, fuchsias, and petunias. Other prole flowers include anything too vividly red, like red tulips. There you will see primarily geraniums (red are lower than pink), poinsettias, and chrysanthemums, and you will know instantly, without even attending to the quality of the discourse, that you are looking at a high-prole setup. One way to learn which flowers are vulgar is to notice the varieties favored on Sunday-morning TV religious programs like Rex Humbard's or Robert Schuller's. Upper-middle-class flowers are rhododendrons, tiger lilies, amaryllis, columbine, clematis, and roses, except for bright-red ones. What is one to make of paragraphs like:Īnyone imagining that just any sort of flowers can be presented in the front of a house without status jeopardy would be wrong. Sometimes it's hard to know whether to take him seriously. He says he prefers the term 'caste system' to 'class system' when describing America, conveying as it does a more rigid and inescapable distinction, and that he uses 'class' only out of respect for conventional usage.

He believes America has one of the most hypertrophied class systems in the world, that its formal equality has left a niche that an informal class system expanded to fill - and expanded, and expanded, until it surpassed the more-legible systems of Europe and became its own sort of homegrown monstrosity. Sure, there may be vast wealth inequality, but at least there's no nobility beggars and billionaires are the same type of citizen. When he tells people he's writing a book on class in America, 'it is as if I had said I am working on a book urging the beating to death of baby whales using the dead bodies of baby seals.' America likes to think of itself as a classless society. He recognizes this might not be the most popular topic. (well, wanted, past tense, it's a 1983 book, we'll come back to that later)

Class a guide through the american status system