Staggering Along the Periphery: Classism in America

[Donnachaidh]

http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/08/staggering-along-the-periphery-classism-in-america/

“The rich are different than you and me,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once famously penned in his short story “The Rich Boy.” Fitzgerald observed that, since the rich are born into wealth, it shapes their worldview — gives rise to an air of superiority and confidence — so that even if they do fall upon hard times or “sink below us,” they still manage to think that they are better than the rest of us. Whether Fitzgerald intended it or not, what he essentially described was a type of mindset that is somewhat akin, in its logic, to racism — that being the notion of classism.

In America, today, we are surrounded by classism. We are immersed in a culture that treats it with the same acceptability that its iniquitous cousin enjoyed not so long ago. What’s more, because of how history played out over much of the 20th century, with the struggle between totalitarian pseudo-communism in the Soviet Union and capitalism here in the U.S., the idea of class struggle has long been considered somewhat of a taboo subject.

The failure to acknowledge the phenomenon has not made it any less real. On cable news programs, entitled wealthy members of Congress rail against welfare entitlements or unemployment benefits for the alleged indolent legions that have found themselves out of work since 2008. On the Internet, popular websites clandestinely snap photos at mega stores frequented by the permanent underclass for the sole purpose of snickering derisively at the less fortunate. From an insular perch somewhere in the nation’s suburbs, the children of the elite (and perhaps what’s left of the middle class) laugh at the clothes, at the physical traits, at the behavior of a class of people that, to them, must seem like some sort of fiction. After all, who needs empathy when you’ve got luck or birthright on your side?

I live in a small town just outside of the Washington, DC metro area — far enough away to preclude it from being considered a true suburb, but close enough to still observe the proximate effects of being so near the wealthiest region of the country. Only recently have we seen an influx of government agencies into the area, and with it the flow of taxpayer money that eventually makes its way into the various (and nefarious) contractor coffers. Long before that subsidy, however, has existed a core of wealth that dates farther back than the Civil War.

More at the link ---

[ejpoeta]

1. you can see it on tv. on shows like cops and many shows on tru tv.

my husband love w atching these worlds dumbest. it is sickening to see frankly. but people watch it. they must or it wouldn't be on tv right? he watched a show that is sort of like extreme home makeover but has bill engvall and it's people with a trailer. i wanted to vomit. honestly. they send this redneck trailer family somewhere while they fix up their trailer. making fun of it the whole time. disgusting.

[Jokerman]

2. Excellent!

This statement hits the nail on the head:

"For them, apparently devoid of any emotional intelligence, the concern is more for how to rid the downtown of Christopher’s presence, lest he undermines its revitalization, rather than understand what caused him to end up there in the first place."

Same reaction to crime, we remove the criminal from society but do nothing about the society that created the criminal.

[canoeist52]

3. The last paragraph sums it up well.

"For all the members of the middle class that have participated in the classist pastimes that once belonged exclusively to the rich, for all the former middle class that spent themselves into oblivion trying to be more than they could ever afford to be, it’s time to recognize classism by its true colors. It is, in effect, a device born of a system brought into being by an elite ruling class, and used to manipulate the middle class, itself a victim, into becoming a willing accomplice to that system’s emplacement. Such bigotry, whether derived from the shade of one’s skin or the size of one’s wallet, is eating away at the foundation of our society. The object of our derision should not be those who have been most adversely affected by our perverse economic system, but the system itself."

[Hannah Bell]

6. +100

[starroute]

4. There's just one sentence I'd take exception to

"Because of how history played out over much of the 20th century, with the struggle between totalitarian pseudo-communism in the Soviet Union and capitalism here in the U.S., the idea of class struggle has long been considered somewhat of a taboo subject."

No -- history didn't just "play itself out." What happened was that after World War II, as the wealthy started to retake the power they'd lost during the Great Depression, they became terrified of calls for genuine economic justice and ginned up the Cold War as a way of demonizing class warfare.

It's been a long, multi-generational, and seemingly successful effort on the part of the rich to claw themselves back to where there were c. 1908, and most of the history of the second half of the 20th century was shaped by it.

[Greyhound]

5. K&R. You know its bad when the aggressors in the existing class war come straight out and

tell us that there is a class war, that the rich are purposely waging and winning it, and yet we still have large numbers of people on the losing side denying that it exists.