I have just finished reading, Class: A guide through the American status system. Although the book is dated (1983,) it remains relevant. Author Paul Fussell looks at what separates Americans in regards to class. Not only is this book right on, but it is also hilarious, often times laugh out loud. Fussell separates classes into nine categories, which are:

Top out-of-sight
Upper
Upper middle
– – – – –
Middle
High proletarian
Mid-proletarian
Low proletarian
– – – – –
Destitute
Bottom out-of-sight

And although money is indeed raised as a factor in segregating the classes, the book goes on to show that it is really style/taste that matters. For instance, in regards to clothing, he says:

There are psychological reasons why proles feel a need to wear legible clothing, and they are more touching than ridiculous. By wearing a garment reading SPORTS ILLUSTRATED or GATORADE, the prole associates himself with an enterprise the world judges successful, and thus, for the moment, he achieves some importance.

In his section about decorating the house, Fussell remarks:

But the most notable characteristic of middle-class decor is the flight from any sort of statement that might be interpreted as “controversial” or ideologically pointed. One can’t be too careful. Pictures, for example: safe are sailing vessels, small children and animals, and pastoral scenes, unlike images that hint any ideological import, like “France,” “Civil War,” “New York City,” or “East European Immigration.” Argument or even disagreement must be avoided at all costs.

Regarding travel, we learn:

The touristic class is predominantly the middle… The middle is the class that makes cruse ships a profitable enterprise, for it fancies that the upper-middle class is to be mixed with on them, without realizing that that class is either peering at the minarets in Istanbul or hiding out in a valley in Nepal, or staying home in Old Lyme, Connecticut, playing backgammon and reading Town and Country.

And about what we read:

As readers, proles are honest, never trying to fake effects of simulate interest in higher things. It’s among the middle class that tastes in reading get really interesting, because it’s only here that pretense, fraud, and misrepresentation enter. 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… the middles, the great audience for how-to books, believe in authorities.

But the passage that made me laugh the most in the book came in the section talking about drifting or shifting between classes:

If social climbing, whether in actuality or in fantasy, is well understood, social sinking is not, although there’s more of it going on than most people notice. Male homosexuals and lesbians, respectively, exemplify these two opposite maneuvers. Ambitious male homosexuals, as least in fantasy, aspire to rise, and from humble origins to ascend to the ownership of antique businesses, art galleries and hair salons. The object is to end by frequenting the Great. They learn to affect elegant telephone voices and gravitate instinctively toward “style” and the grand. 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.

At the end of the book, Fussell talks about something he dubs, “The X Way Out.” People in this class, X people, tend to transcend these distinctions in a kind of witty an irreverent way, that is to say they distance themselves from but do not ultimately reject the existence or necessity of such constructs. If you want to read about X people, and see if you are one, you’ll have to buy the book yourself. I would like to see an updated version of this book, especially now that we have an Ivy League educated president who acts as folksy cowboy (a kind of dumbing down of America to which Fussell alludes.) For all the humor in the book, though, I think this is a very important topic for the times. Considering that the world is becoming more globalized, what does that mean to the unique American class system. Do current distinctions remain relevant, and if not, what fundamental re-structuring is called for? Hard to know, but it’s important to look into this topic, class, which seems to be the great elephant in the room when it comes to American life.