perhaps for this to be ok there needs to be still some kind of affinity/connection/affection/identification with your background (which i guess means you havent escaped it as such, you still see yourself as being of that upbringing, but even then i think you would have to actually engage with your past actively, otherwise you have cut all ties, camped to the other side etc)
― gareth (gareth), Friday, 30 April 2004 06:47 (twenty years ago) link
All I would really like to say is that N. and Ronan have said things which have really made me think. (Is this because they're also middle class, privately educated bastards?)
Class issues become more than just a (potentially mobile) money issue when you have two distinct and often inherently unequal cultures living side by side. In the US, this isn't as much masked by the race issue as exacerbated by it. In the UK, you have two markedly different and distinct cultures who have been living side by side (or rather one on top of another) effectively since the Norman Conquest (operatively since the Tudor era, but hey, what's 500 years between classes?).
A lot of my "classist" jokes are knee-jerk reactions of one sort or another - because I've developed a perverse reactionary "say what people would expect the toff to say becauase they're going to demonise you anyway" twitch. Because even when I say what I actually believe, people don't read what I'm saying, they just read what they would expect Someone Like Me to say. (Ronan's description struck a real chord with a younger me, even though I wasn't on drugs.)
Anyway... I've got to preserve my place in the class structure and get back to work now.
― Super-Kate (kate), Friday, 30 April 2004 07:12 (twenty years ago) link
There are, then, cunts whereever you go. I think middle-class cuntishness towards the proles is getting worse though - and at the risk, I see Loaded culutre to blame, where politics got taken out of things, and anything was good for a laugh, and woe-betide the po-faced cunt who raises an objection (porn is cool and rocks, and don't fucking spoil it by reminding us of E. Europe human traffickers, you po-faced cunts). There was a quiet reserve which whilst looking down on the lower orders, wouldn't have laughed at them; it wasn't needed. The middle-class had won. The working class were for manual labour and for being repositories of all that was wrong, but not comic material; comedy is interesting as I think for most of the 20th C, most of British humour has been resolutely working-class in nature. Maybe the alternative comedy broke that back perhaps? Unintended consequence of lefty-gagmerchants being denigration of working class?
(cf debate about middle-clas left and rootedness in politics of reason, rather than empathy; vulnerable to sudden shifts (witness the Hitchens boys))
― Dave B (daveb), Friday, 30 April 2004 14:48 (twenty years ago) link
I think council estate residents, chavs, pramfaces, dole scroungers, whatever the condescending nu-media working class chooses to call them, represent a level of "acceptable poverty" that makes them fair game - I can't imagine a similar level of barbed humour being considered acceptable when talking about, say, the homeless, or pensioners living in squalour, or even asylum seekers (although the latter is becoming regrettably less so).
I could expand on this and say it possibly has something to do with the British welfare state but I am hungover and it would probably be bollocks anyway.
― Matt DC (Matt DC), Friday, 30 April 2004 15:13 (twenty years ago) link
― Mary (Mary), Saturday, 1 May 2004 01:16 (twenty years ago) link
Most of the time I assume its invisibility is benign, then some assholish shit like this starts up.
― Dickerson Pike (Dickerson Pike), Saturday, 1 May 2004 03:49 (twenty years ago) link
― jel -- (jel), Saturday, 1 May 2004 10:54 (twenty years ago) link
― cozen (Cozen), Saturday, 1 May 2004 11:31 (twenty years ago) link