I rarely get into casual conversations about politics, but when I do, if the person I'm talking with says he is worried about "entitlement programs," that's usually a tell that person grew up with the benefit of financial assistance from his parent/s once he screwed up and needed a sweet influx of cash. Rich people like to worry about "entitlement programs" because they've been entitled to stable financial backing. Poor people worry about getting through the week.
I finally got around to reading my spring issue of The American Scholar. The feature article is "Color Lines: How DNA Ancestry Testing Can Turn Our Notions of Race and Ethnicity Upside Down" by W. Ralph Eubanks. It's worth a good read. Ponder this passage if the title intrigues you: "What we see when we look at a person may or may not correlate to his or her ancestral and ethnic background. DNA results confirmed for me that identity cannot be constructed based on a “percentage” of African ancestry, and that our society’s generally accepted racial categories cannot begin to address the complexity and nuance of our heritage. I soon began to think about race only in terms of culture and biology together. And as race became an abstract rather than a concrete concept, the categorical ways in which I had thought about race in the past were quickly broken down. Once we see how small the differences are that bring about the characteristics we think of as racial—hair, skin color, eyes, facial features—in relation to the entire human genome, it’s hard to make a fuss about them. Our differences are astonishingly slight."
During the summer I interact with incoming college students and their parents on a regular basis. In yet another sign I'm getting old, one recycled fashion trend I've noticed is the resurgence of boat shoes. I didn't care for them in the 80s, and I still don't like them. Regardless, happy boating everyone!
Showing posts with label Social Class. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Social Class. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 9, 2013
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Class Issues
In the process of cleaning up/reorganizing some stuff around home, I came across an issue of Utne I had held back because I wanted to feature an article in it because the essay connects to some of my own "class issues."
In "Cutting Class" from an issue of Utne a year ago, Brad Zellar explores his working class guilt.
If you have to boil my "issues" down to a basic statement, it would this: rich people usually piss me off.
It's not that I grew up poor or anything. Sure, when my dad got laid off by National Tea when I was quite young, I remember there being stress within the house. He moved on to selling insurance for a while and then was lucky enough to acquire a small business loan that helped him start his business. For a major part of his life, my dad was a meat cutter and then carried over some of his meat cutting skills to when he ran his own small grocery store on what people considered the "wrong side" of the industrial town in which I grew up.
So I guess I understand the working class pretty well because I come from that stock (both parents were children during the Great Depression--one from rural northeastern Missouri, the other from an essentially single-parent home in northwestern Iowa), and I was raised in what could be called a "factory town" -- factories, mills, and meat packing plants. The stores I worked in were visited by folks who worked putting together tractors or slaughtering hogs.
And the thing is I was envious of the kids whose dads worked at the John Deere plants, or to use the phrase in my hometown, they worked at "Deere." It was always pretty clear what kids' parents worked at Deere because they were the ones who got braces. Those of us who didn't have great insurance plans, we were left with what was in our jaws unless our collections of teeth were especially horrific.
Like Zellar recounts in his essay, my parents would also take me on car rides to look at the big houses, which when I reflect on that practice now, it kind of sickens me -- the gawking at the big homes in the fancy part of town or the oversized houses on the edge of town where the darkness is, as Springsteen informs us.
I fooled around with some of the girls from the rich part of town though, sitting in their homes watching movies and doing other things, often admiring what they seemed to have so easily.
I waited on very good people who came into our grocery or liqour store with pig blood on them, their hands aching from their duties on the cutting floor, cashing their checks as they bought a bottle or to visit a local bar.
Where I worked was an interesting mix of black and white folks. The stores I worked at had trailor "parks" right across from them. Not that far away was the area where many working and middle class black families lived. There was rarely any open racial hostility during store hours, but sometimes you noticed tension among "mixed" clentile.
What Zellar's article also got me to thinking about is how as a country I wonder what all we really produce anymore. At one time, we Americans, well, we made stuff. Sure, we are no longer the manufacturing giant like we once were because of globalization -- for better and for worse. Now it's just that we hawk stuff while the 1% get even richer. Or heck, I don't know, let's just say the 5-10% get richer while they have natural inroads for success and safety nets along with McMansions on the Hills.
Like Zellar, "[t]ime and time again I committed the terrible sin of envy, until it became wholly ingrained in my makeup and I eventually developed a chip on my shoulder that I felt no amount of accomplishment would ever manage to erase."
Which is why I have interal reactions like I did a number of years ago when I was talking to one of my colleagues. I asked him how his summer was, and he said it was great because he spent quite a bit of it in Paris. For someone like me who has only been to Ontario for a couple of fishing trips and family vacations were spent visiting family or going to exotic places like South Dakota, the idea of going to Europe doesn't seem probable. My reaction to a really nice man's statement that he spent time with his wife in Paris angered me, not because I don't like him or his wife (they're nice people by all accounts), but because of envy, of the fact that some people over the course of my life always seem to have it so easy -- my internal, jaded sense of justice.
And it's pride, which as we know comes before the fall. Even if I have accomplishments, I'm wary that I'm gonna get screwed eventually. Healthy...
One of the events that got me thinking back to Zellar's article is, of course, Christmas and the deluge of presents my children received. As he relates toward the close of the essay, "The dream of our parents' has become a reality of millions of us, but it also, inevitably, comes at someone else's expense and, to a lesser extent, at our own."
For me, I want my kids to be able to both know the sciences and philosophy and art and poetry, but I also want them to appreciate the majesty of Hank Williams, master the art of talking to and being open to diverse people (diversity based on class and ethnicity and creed), and most importantly know how to get things done.
I acknowledge that this post is a bit scatterbrained, but it might also reflect that, like Zellar, sometimes I feel that I'm "an interloper in all worlds."
So it goes.
In "Cutting Class" from an issue of Utne a year ago, Brad Zellar explores his working class guilt.
If you have to boil my "issues" down to a basic statement, it would this: rich people usually piss me off.
It's not that I grew up poor or anything. Sure, when my dad got laid off by National Tea when I was quite young, I remember there being stress within the house. He moved on to selling insurance for a while and then was lucky enough to acquire a small business loan that helped him start his business. For a major part of his life, my dad was a meat cutter and then carried over some of his meat cutting skills to when he ran his own small grocery store on what people considered the "wrong side" of the industrial town in which I grew up.
So I guess I understand the working class pretty well because I come from that stock (both parents were children during the Great Depression--one from rural northeastern Missouri, the other from an essentially single-parent home in northwestern Iowa), and I was raised in what could be called a "factory town" -- factories, mills, and meat packing plants. The stores I worked in were visited by folks who worked putting together tractors or slaughtering hogs.
And the thing is I was envious of the kids whose dads worked at the John Deere plants, or to use the phrase in my hometown, they worked at "Deere." It was always pretty clear what kids' parents worked at Deere because they were the ones who got braces. Those of us who didn't have great insurance plans, we were left with what was in our jaws unless our collections of teeth were especially horrific.
Like Zellar recounts in his essay, my parents would also take me on car rides to look at the big houses, which when I reflect on that practice now, it kind of sickens me -- the gawking at the big homes in the fancy part of town or the oversized houses on the edge of town where the darkness is, as Springsteen informs us.
I fooled around with some of the girls from the rich part of town though, sitting in their homes watching movies and doing other things, often admiring what they seemed to have so easily.
I waited on very good people who came into our grocery or liqour store with pig blood on them, their hands aching from their duties on the cutting floor, cashing their checks as they bought a bottle or to visit a local bar.
Where I worked was an interesting mix of black and white folks. The stores I worked at had trailor "parks" right across from them. Not that far away was the area where many working and middle class black families lived. There was rarely any open racial hostility during store hours, but sometimes you noticed tension among "mixed" clentile.
What Zellar's article also got me to thinking about is how as a country I wonder what all we really produce anymore. At one time, we Americans, well, we made stuff. Sure, we are no longer the manufacturing giant like we once were because of globalization -- for better and for worse. Now it's just that we hawk stuff while the 1% get even richer. Or heck, I don't know, let's just say the 5-10% get richer while they have natural inroads for success and safety nets along with McMansions on the Hills.
Like Zellar, "[t]ime and time again I committed the terrible sin of envy, until it became wholly ingrained in my makeup and I eventually developed a chip on my shoulder that I felt no amount of accomplishment would ever manage to erase."
Which is why I have interal reactions like I did a number of years ago when I was talking to one of my colleagues. I asked him how his summer was, and he said it was great because he spent quite a bit of it in Paris. For someone like me who has only been to Ontario for a couple of fishing trips and family vacations were spent visiting family or going to exotic places like South Dakota, the idea of going to Europe doesn't seem probable. My reaction to a really nice man's statement that he spent time with his wife in Paris angered me, not because I don't like him or his wife (they're nice people by all accounts), but because of envy, of the fact that some people over the course of my life always seem to have it so easy -- my internal, jaded sense of justice.
And it's pride, which as we know comes before the fall. Even if I have accomplishments, I'm wary that I'm gonna get screwed eventually. Healthy...
One of the events that got me thinking back to Zellar's article is, of course, Christmas and the deluge of presents my children received. As he relates toward the close of the essay, "The dream of our parents' has become a reality of millions of us, but it also, inevitably, comes at someone else's expense and, to a lesser extent, at our own."
For me, I want my kids to be able to both know the sciences and philosophy and art and poetry, but I also want them to appreciate the majesty of Hank Williams, master the art of talking to and being open to diverse people (diversity based on class and ethnicity and creed), and most importantly know how to get things done.
I acknowledge that this post is a bit scatterbrained, but it might also reflect that, like Zellar, sometimes I feel that I'm "an interloper in all worlds."
So it goes.
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Random Notes from a Crank
With the reading and work I've done this fall, from time to time I've pondered this example of chiasmus: "the leisure of the theory class."
Which leads me to this statement: I taught Chuck Norris and gave him a C because that's what he earned.
For whatever reason, I've had a craving for radishes. Rest easy folks, I'm not pregnant. Considering their nutritional value, I should be doing fine on potassium, vitamin C, and magnesium. The store-bought ones I got recently disappointed though because they were pithy. They didn't have the fiery nature of the homegrown ones my dad used to grow in his garden, so I plan to try those this next growing season along with pickling cucumbers. I'll be back to stinking up the house with my pickling this summer. I also wonder how pickled radishes might work out...
I don't get how many people in this area, when talking to their kids, describe a child's sister as a "sissy." People, you're calling your kids ... sissies. Think about it. Replace sissy with another possible derogatory term, such as "chump," and consider how it plays out. Grandma talking to her grandson at the park: "Ah, Aiden, don't you luuuuuuv your chump? Your chump is so good to you, isn't she?" Also, "sissy" is so baby talkish. Am I the only one who thinks this is strange and annoying?
Which leads me to this statement: I taught Chuck Norris and gave him a C because that's what he earned.
For whatever reason, I've had a craving for radishes. Rest easy folks, I'm not pregnant. Considering their nutritional value, I should be doing fine on potassium, vitamin C, and magnesium. The store-bought ones I got recently disappointed though because they were pithy. They didn't have the fiery nature of the homegrown ones my dad used to grow in his garden, so I plan to try those this next growing season along with pickling cucumbers. I'll be back to stinking up the house with my pickling this summer. I also wonder how pickled radishes might work out...
I don't get how many people in this area, when talking to their kids, describe a child's sister as a "sissy." People, you're calling your kids ... sissies. Think about it. Replace sissy with another possible derogatory term, such as "chump," and consider how it plays out. Grandma talking to her grandson at the park: "Ah, Aiden, don't you luuuuuuv your chump? Your chump is so good to you, isn't she?" Also, "sissy" is so baby talkish. Am I the only one who thinks this is strange and annoying?
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Random Notes from a Crank
I know morons use the stuff in Advil Cold & Sinus to make methamphetamine, but that medicine works. With the harvest happening here in central Illinois, I'm all congested and a bit sickly. Having to provide my driver's license to get the good stuff (Advil, people, not crystal meth) is no problem since it's going to make me feel better.
This pisses me off: "Drop Dead." We should expect many folks from Florida universities polishing their CVs and going on the job market again. And New College (one of the colleges noted in the article) is consistently ranked as one of the best college values in American education.
What's the deal (channeling Andy Rooney) with people not acknowledging you've sent them an email? I say this as an occasional offender of what I'm complaining about, so I also need to do better. But lack of acknowledgement happens to me all the time, whether it's colleagues or students. A simple "Thanks" will do.
For whatever reason, my son insists on making the past tense of the verb pee to be "peeped." For example, "I peeped in the toilet, Dad." He knows better, but he's just using the word because he knows it's not right. Good thing we didn't name him Tom.
For those painting the Wall Street protesters as clowns, I give you a piece in Business Insider that is heavy on visuals: "CHARTS: "Here's What the Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About..." by Henry Blodget. Those visuals cohere with the article I linked in my previous "Random Notes..." post.
The passing of Steve Jobs has created some interesting claims about what he did for the world. Since I'm not the most technologically savvy or knowledgeable about computers, I'll quote what one of my buddies, who works for a major computer company, put as his FB status for a short while: "Dear Internets, I like my iPhone and all but it's worth noting that Jobs did not invent the smartphone, or the computer, or digital music distribution. He did it better than anyone else had done up to the point they were introduced. He was a phenomenal marketing and design guy with a flair for the dramatic. Apple is Apple because of Job's marketing and design brilliance not because he invented anything. So, please stop with the Edison comparisons and just remember him for what he really really did, make great products and market the hell out of them." I don't know how right my buddy is, but I did notice that many of the articles written about Jobs quoted professors of marketing.
This pisses me off: "Drop Dead." We should expect many folks from Florida universities polishing their CVs and going on the job market again. And New College (one of the colleges noted in the article) is consistently ranked as one of the best college values in American education.
What's the deal (channeling Andy Rooney) with people not acknowledging you've sent them an email? I say this as an occasional offender of what I'm complaining about, so I also need to do better. But lack of acknowledgement happens to me all the time, whether it's colleagues or students. A simple "Thanks" will do.
For whatever reason, my son insists on making the past tense of the verb pee to be "peeped." For example, "I peeped in the toilet, Dad." He knows better, but he's just using the word because he knows it's not right. Good thing we didn't name him Tom.
For those painting the Wall Street protesters as clowns, I give you a piece in Business Insider that is heavy on visuals: "CHARTS: "Here's What the Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About..." by Henry Blodget. Those visuals cohere with the article I linked in my previous "Random Notes..." post.
The passing of Steve Jobs has created some interesting claims about what he did for the world. Since I'm not the most technologically savvy or knowledgeable about computers, I'll quote what one of my buddies, who works for a major computer company, put as his FB status for a short while: "Dear Internets, I like my iPhone and all but it's worth noting that Jobs did not invent the smartphone, or the computer, or digital music distribution. He did it better than anyone else had done up to the point they were introduced. He was a phenomenal marketing and design guy with a flair for the dramatic. Apple is Apple because of Job's marketing and design brilliance not because he invented anything. So, please stop with the Edison comparisons and just remember him for what he really really did, make great products and market the hell out of them." I don't know how right my buddy is, but I did notice that many of the articles written about Jobs quoted professors of marketing.
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Random Notes from a Crank
I was in a grumpy mood today, so I tried listening to music as I cooked. The new Blind Pilot didn't work--too upbeat and poppy. The new album by Dawes didn't work either. I finally hit the sweet spot by listening to Glossary's Feral Fire, a fine album. They should be coming out with a new one soon I think.
I finally got around to reading an interesting, depressing, detailed, and somewhat hopeful article by Don Peck in The Atlantic today. It's "Can the Middle Class Be Saved?" if you're interested.
When I was reading about SEC realignment talk the other day on TiderInsider, I realized I left out Ole Miss and Mississippi State from my proposed North-South divisions in the comments section of my post. Sorry about that Magnolia State or Black Bear State and whatever the hell people call you. Here's a revision of those if Mizzou joins since I now have the road atlas in front of me. North: Mizzou, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Vanderbilt, South Carolina, and Ole Miss. South: A&M, LSU, Mississippi State, Alabama, Auburn, Georgia, and Florida. Or heck, why not divide the conference using I-65? West: A&M, Arkansas, Mizzou, LSU, Ole Miss, State, and Alabama. East: Vandy, Kentucky, Tennessee, Auburn, Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida.
I'm sad to report the current state of proofreading in America has dropped to an all-time low: weather and whether are getting confused now. @#$% you, Spellcheck systems.
I finally got around to reading an interesting, depressing, detailed, and somewhat hopeful article by Don Peck in The Atlantic today. It's "Can the Middle Class Be Saved?" if you're interested.
When I was reading about SEC realignment talk the other day on TiderInsider, I realized I left out Ole Miss and Mississippi State from my proposed North-South divisions in the comments section of my post. Sorry about that Magnolia State or Black Bear State and whatever the hell people call you. Here's a revision of those if Mizzou joins since I now have the road atlas in front of me. North: Mizzou, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Vanderbilt, South Carolina, and Ole Miss. South: A&M, LSU, Mississippi State, Alabama, Auburn, Georgia, and Florida. Or heck, why not divide the conference using I-65? West: A&M, Arkansas, Mizzou, LSU, Ole Miss, State, and Alabama. East: Vandy, Kentucky, Tennessee, Auburn, Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida.
I'm sad to report the current state of proofreading in America has dropped to an all-time low: weather and whether are getting confused now. @#$% you, Spellcheck systems.
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Elizabeth Cook on Letterman
The other night singer/songwriter Elizabeth Cook was a guest on The Late Show.
I featured a couple of Cook's tunes on a Music Friday a while back, but her visit to Letterman's show was to promote her satellite radio program on "Outlaw Country" since Dave seems to have taken a liking to her program.
It's one of the more entertaining interviews I've seen on a late night program in a while.
As much as I bristle at how both Dave and the audience were laughing at her because it's easy to make fun of someone with a Southern accent, I think Ms. Cook showed how she's one of the more intriguing music personalities out there right now. As they like to say in Alabama, she "showed out" on the program.
Granted, Cook did take a light-hearted approach to talking about her family background, and she showed how she doesn't take herself too seriously. However, I typically have sensitive antennae about how people might think Southerners or people from humble backgrounds like Cook are appropriate for close-minded ridicule and easy punch lines. The fools often get played with Southern accents in American culture, which pisses me off.
Regardless, Letterman having Justin Townes Earle on his program months ago was a good sign, and I look forward to watching Cook play on his show in the future. Now if he books Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit and Amanda Shires, I'd be really pleased.
!Viva Americana Music!
If you want to check out the interview, it's below. Enjoy.
I featured a couple of Cook's tunes on a Music Friday a while back, but her visit to Letterman's show was to promote her satellite radio program on "Outlaw Country" since Dave seems to have taken a liking to her program.
It's one of the more entertaining interviews I've seen on a late night program in a while.
As much as I bristle at how both Dave and the audience were laughing at her because it's easy to make fun of someone with a Southern accent, I think Ms. Cook showed how she's one of the more intriguing music personalities out there right now. As they like to say in Alabama, she "showed out" on the program.
Granted, Cook did take a light-hearted approach to talking about her family background, and she showed how she doesn't take herself too seriously. However, I typically have sensitive antennae about how people might think Southerners or people from humble backgrounds like Cook are appropriate for close-minded ridicule and easy punch lines. The fools often get played with Southern accents in American culture, which pisses me off.
Regardless, Letterman having Justin Townes Earle on his program months ago was a good sign, and I look forward to watching Cook play on his show in the future. Now if he books Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit and Amanda Shires, I'd be really pleased.
!Viva Americana Music!
If you want to check out the interview, it's below. Enjoy.
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Kitchen Bling
In the May issue of The Atlantic, Megan McCardle has an article that takes a look at how kitchens have become more of showplaces than areas where people actually do some cooking.
She recounts how the kitchen has changed over the decades, with the newer ones being blingtastic with fancy knives, expensive countertops, and high-end housewares even though the numbers of people cooking at home have been going down for years. The research she cites provides this contrast: "even in the 1980s, 72 percent of meals eaten in the home involved an entree cooked from scratch; now just 59 percent of them do, and the average number of food items used per meal has decreased from 4.4 to 3.5. That's when we're home at all: by 1995, we consumed more than a quarter of all meals and snacks outside the home, up from 16 percent two decades earlier."
If you're interested in how American kitchens have changed, check out "The Joy of Not Cooking."
I used the verb "changed" instead of "progressed" or "evolved" because I think some of the buying habits related in the article are silly or just flat out dumb.
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Taking Home
The picture above is from when my father was in boot camp during the Second World War. As far as military uniforms go, I've always liked the Navy's. Then again, both my dad and my oldest brother were in the Navy although my grandfather (WWI) and two uncles (one in WWII and the other in Korea) were in the Army.
My sister scanned this old photo of Virg and sent it to me since the local TV station in my hometown, the city that was the home of the Five Sullivan Brothers, is doing some segment on veterans. She sent it to the station and then me.
There was a time when I thought about going into the Navy right out of high school. I never took the military test or contacted a recruiter because that would have put the hard-press on me with military recruiters constantly pestering me.
I would have gone in right before the first Gulf War, which didn't involve the Navy as much as other wars have, though I may be wrong in that assumption. I'm no scholar of military history.
But I was too interested in college instead of learning a trade such as being an electrician. I traveled to Kirksville, Missouri for schooling, which strangely enough is just north of where Virg went to high school in La Plata, birthplace of Lester Dent, author of Doc Savage pulp fiction. Virg's family settled in northeastern Missouri after my grandfather didn't do well farming in Minnesota and found better prospects in the Show Me State.
But to get back to learning a trade, as I was fond of telling my colleague where I worked previously, there are some days when I think to myself, "Maybe I should have been an electrician."
Just like anyone else who gets some years behind them, you begin to think about the past choices you've made and how little decisions have greatly affected how you got to be where you are now or who you're with or what's happened in your life in general. If you think too much about such things, the alternate causal chains may drive you crazy.
So where the am I going with this? Hell, I don't know. I've all over the place in this post.
I guess I'm thinking about living a full life and the choices I've made since Virg will head down to Iowa City at the end of the month to have major heart surgery.
One aspect of my dad's personality that I might have picked up on is that, as many people know, Virg is not afraid to give you his opinion. He can be brutal with his honesty. He's demanding. And he sometimes says exactly what's on his mind. Unfiltered.
For some jobs, like being an electrician or a meat cutter or a manager of a grocery store, those tendencies are perfectly fine. For other professions, they can be a detriment on certain occasions.
Regardless, this weekend the Nasty family heads up to Waterloo to gather belongings and other artifacts from my parent's house that is now going to be sold since they've moved into an assisted living facility. I'll be bringing back a deep freeze, gardening tools, and other assorted stuff.
I'm not going home; I'm taking home.
And that makes me sad.
Friday, April 2, 2010
Music Friday: "Pink Houses" and "Born in the USA"
Ah, nostalgia for the 80s -- how I embrace you.
If last week's Music Friday wasn't enough, how 'bout Mellencamp playing one of his signature songs at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony and the same man performing Springsteen's "Born in the USA."
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Over the Cedar
I don't know why I've been thinking about this lately, but I've been pondering my childhood and where I grew up. I guess it's inevitable as I make the slow lurch toward 40, but I'm pretty confident some of the reading I've been doing lately is part of the cause (see "Thoughts on the Midwest").
But when I think back to growing up in Waterloo, Iowa, one image that I come back to is going across the Cedar on the green 18th Street bridge most days when I would work at my Dad's grocery store--crossing over from the west side to the east side, the "bad part of town," a phrase that is so racially-tinged and socio-economically tangled that it deserves its own post or essay.
I made that trip over the Cedar all the time when I was much younger than working age when my Mom and I would stop in at my father's store to shop, and that was when Rath Packing Co. was still in business. When I was young, I remember it being huge--trailers stacked up waiting to unload pigs and cattle for the killing floors, the musky stench of death and dirt and diesel, the white water tower with the Rath logo on it-a red, rudimentary image of an Indian chief, the Packer's Inn bar across from the plant whetting the appetites of working folks.
Later on, once Rath went belly up in '85, the city was hurting. Bad. The 80s were not a good time to be in Waterloo with Rath closing and John Deere (the city's largest employer) with its multiple layoffs throughout the decade. Reagan espoused "Morning in America," and Waterloo's America exemplified job losses and hard times. The mornings were pretty damn dark.
While I can't describe my parents as white collar by any stretch of the imagination, I also think growing up in Waterloo gave me a certain blue collar mindset that usually serves me well but also creates crankiness since I work in academia, a place where sometimes being straightforward and at times blunt and also prone to being intolerant of bullshit are not prized characteristics.
But I'm still hung up on these questions: Why Rath? Why is that trip over the river and a now defunct packing plant so emblematic to me about my hometown? Maybe it's mere repetition because that's what I did since I made that trip across the bridge so often.
But the academic in me (damn you!) makes me think it means something more.
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Thorstein Veblen Was Right and Somewhat Wrong
Linked HERE is an article that talks about consumption patterns and tendencies depending on race and class. It's an interesting read that relates recent research by economists and plays with Veblen's famous hypothesis of "conspicuous consumption."
If you see cars with really expensive rims or you see a high-schooler wearing an Abercrombie & Fitch or Hollister t-shirt (isn't Hollister the new Ocean Pacific?), this article might explain some things.
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