America's Classless Society

This confirms one of my constant class-based frustrations. When examining the achievements of an Ivy (or equivalent) student, it's rarely looked at in the context of their class/culture.

The one that pops into mind - I've seen some journals in bookstores by a student/photojournalist (Daniel Elder, I think) who died. The blurbs make a big deal out of all the travelling and wonderful things he did young, and then kind of downplay the fact that his mother was CEO of a media corporation.

Well, gee, man, that makes it a lot easier to backpack around South America and get all Beatniky on me, when you don't have to worry about paying food/rent/school or much of anything.

And it seems like the number of artists/writers/filmmakers/whatever who make it without the class/education-based connections gets smaller all the time.

Is the income-cultural divide getting wider, or is it my imagination? Are working-class/lower-middle class people going back to the 'ghettos' of manual labor and having intellectual/artistic pursuits closed off to them?

there's still an "old boy's network," and it still centers on the ivies and pseudo-ivies (i.e., places like georgetown or u. michigan). and now blacks, asians, females, and white ethnics aren't automatically excluded (which is progress). only now it's "merit" (i.e., you went to Harvard Law or got yer MBA at Wharton Business).

making a long story short: the attitudes (namely, the need to feel "superior" to yer alleged "lessers") haven't really changed, just the criteria. i guess "merit" is better than race/gender/ethnicity, but snobbery is still snobbery. and when you factor in current (and increasing) economic inequalities, it can be just as bad. and does someone who's being looked down upon feel any better about it because they're being looked down upon because they were a B student at State University instead of being looked down upon because of their color or their parent's occupations?

Of course, this has probably always been true. The peasants in the fields probably had less resentment of and more reverence for the lords and barons than did the merchants and traders who directly serviced the ruling class. It's why the middle class has always been ground zero for revolutions -- and why the American ruling class has been methodically cutting the props out from under the middle class that dominated American life and politics during much of the 20th century. And keeping themselves largely invisible along the way.

This, like most of the rest of your post, Jesse, is a ridiculous assumption. I'm "just ordinary people" (in the middle class), and I certainly am aware of what kind of universe the rich can afford, and I would certainly never think anything ridiculous such as the whole "Wal-Mart is for the proles; Target is for the bourgeois" line of thinking.

My parents were raised dirt poor. You couldn't get much poorer in the 1940s and 1950s. They never wanted me to become a snob or to live extravagantly. They thought those qualities of the rich were to be looked down upon and/or thought as silly. So they didn't revere the rich. They just wanted me to strive to become rich, or at least very financially comfortable in a way that would enable me to not have to live paycheck to paycheck.

But I suppose you are right in the whole "class? what class?" aspect of your post. Normally when I'm going about my everyday life, I am barely aware of "class", much like how I'm normally unaware of my ethnicity. I'm too busy trying to navigate the craziness that is life, appreciating the small things, worrying about the big things, concerned for others, etc., to concern myself about issues of "class" or "ethnicity". Perhaps it *would* be different for me if I lived in NYC or Alabama, for example, but surely the place I call home isn't the only location in the U.S. that is this way.

However, I have no idea what Jesse's talking about with this line...

the places you can't afford to eat at and would probably be turned back at the door from anyway because of having the wrong shoes or tie or whatever

the number of restaurants in NY with an actual dress code is rather small. and there are many comparably expensive restaurants in NYC that are filled with people from the "hinterlands". there is nowhere that will turn you away at the door - they'll just give you a jacket to wear.

I also wonder who exactly the "American ruling class" is in the following...

the American ruling class has been methodically cutting the props out from under the middle class that dominated American life and politics during much of the 20th century. And keeping themselves largely invisible along the way.

Well, if you would consider San Antonio a "major city", which I thought was regarded by people who lived outside the city as a "podunk large city wannabe". But I consider it a city, yes.

Apologies for the misunderstanding if there was one, though. I scanned through some of that post and thought you (Jesse) were talking about the World Outside of NYC. My bad.

EUROPE??? EUROPE??? Yeah, sure. If you want a perfect indicator of a place that is truly class-conscious, overly obsessed with The Classes, hard on people who wish to transfer into and out of classes, Europe would just about do it for you.

Listen, higher education doesn't mean anything in regards to "classes". Just because you've got a college degree doesn't make you any higher up on the class strata. What accomplishes a leap upward is lots and lots of hard work, and plenty of time living below your means, and saving saving saving, and living in a locale that doesn't make you feel like shit if you were born into poverty and ended up in the middle class. If my parents had lived in Europe, they would've probably stayed poor, and I would've been raised poor, and my children would've been raised poor, etc. And even if we did manage to become wealthier we would've been treated as pretenders, outsiders, people to sneer at.

Mom & Dad both went no higher than a high school education. They did a lot of socioeconomic moving THROUGHOUT their working lives, which goes far beyond the 1973 cutoff date you've set. In fact, we didn't even achieve our current level until almost 20 years later, in 1992. How do I explain that? A lot of self-sacrifice, being fiscally wise, work work work, and living in the U.S.

But I think it's statistically verifiable that a poor child born in the USA had far fewer "life chances" than the equivalent child born in, say, the UK. Of course, personal experience can give us lots of examples of social dynamism, and possibly there are fewer cultural class issues in the US (not so many old boys networks possibly). But in terms of economics, on a large scale, the US is polarising classwise.

of course not, but we're talking about access to education surely? what it achieves is another issue, but when there is inequality of access to public services surely we have a problem

a) people with college degrees then are able to climb the class ladder

or b) people higher up the class ladder are more likely to go to college and get the degree

?

Nothing 'unconscious' about it, though I wouldn't characterize the processes as "anti-American," so much as "I wish America wouldn't suck so much."

not that that really matters. i just don't know if i like the tone of the title. after all, u have to remember the ideal: at least mericans *may* have aspired towards a classless society at some point, as opposed to aristocracy-ridden old world. or maybe i'm just speaking mythologically, based on what i've learned in an upper-class american school's history curriculum
But America never aspired to any sort of classless society. Pretending class doesn't exist != classless. If anything, our class system, in that it's widely considered invisible (or nonexistent) is more dangerous than Britain.

and the strangest part is the americans i met were some of the most warm and friendly people ive ever met (im no anti american, in fact i now love them). and yet the people who've been elected....

Whereas any kind of college degree in 1955 was a step forward, today, it's become commonplace. For a college degree to make that kind of impact today, it has to come from one of the prestigious colleges (as alluded to here). Which, of course, are skewed heavily toward the upper end of the economic spectrum.

What accomplishes a leap upward is lots and lots of hard work, and plenty of time living below your means, and saving saving saving, and living in a locale that doesn't make you feel like shit if you were born into poverty and ended up in the middle class.
But that's just the Horatio Alger myth. Working hard and living in your means isn't any sort of guaranteed ticket up or out.

American class fluidity is grossly overstated.

If my parents had lived in Europe, they would've probably stayed poor, and I would've been raised poor, and my children would've been raised poor, etc. And even if we did manage to become wealthier we would've been treated as pretenders, outsiders, people to sneer at.
Not from what I can tell. In Europe, you would have had access to healthcare and a good education, both of which elude the working/lower-middle/lower classes in the US.

A lot of self-sacrifice, being fiscally wise, work work work, and living in the U.S.

And luck. No one got sick. No one got disabled.

"Census data show that 81.6 percent of those families who were in the bottom quintile [the poorest 20 percent] of the income distribution in 1985 were still in that bottom quintile the next year; for the top quintile the fraction was 76.3 percent. Over longer time periods, there is more mixing, but still not that much. Studies by the Urban Institute and the U.S. Treasury have both found that about half of the families who start in either the top or the bottom quintile of the income distribution are still there after a decade, and that only 3 to 6 percent rise from bottom to top or fall from top to bottom.

"Even this overstates income mobility, since (i) those who slip out of the top quintile (say) are typically at the bottom of that category, and (ii) much of the movement up and down represents fluctuations around a fairly fixed long-term distribution." - Paul Krugman

That wasn't so much my point as that the Wal-Mart/Target divide (which is real, if exaggerated here for rhetorical purposes) is one of the few visible class divides in a lot of parts of the country (i.e. suburbs, small cities and towns, rural areas -- all of which I have also lived in), and it ain't even really much of a divide. The very rich -- who are also the very powerful -- are mostly invisible in a lot of those places. And I'm just quoting attitudinal surveys I've seen cited by people on both the left and right -- people on the left (Paul Krugman, for example, glad to see him quoted above) tend to cite them as evidence of the sinister effects of the invisibility of wealth and power, while people on the right (the Cato Institute, e.g.) quote them to show that folks in the heartland just aren't as et up with envy and self-loathing as folks in big liberal cities. Both of which are gross generalizations, but not without some basis.

Normally when I'm going about my everyday life, I am barely aware of "class", much like how I'm normally unaware of my ethnicity. I'm too busy trying to navigate the craziness that is life, appreciating the small things, worrying about the big things, concerned for others, etc., to concern myself about issues of "class" or "ethnicity".

You may not be aware of class, but class is aware of you -- that is, it's a persistent force in our culture, whether acknowledged or not. And its lack of acknowledgment, of course, plays in favor of people with the most money and power. That's why they scream "class warfare" any time anyone wonders why the representatives of the entire population spend so much time tinkering with things like the estate tax and dividend taxes. I'm all in favor of savoring the craziness of the world. I spend more time walking in the park and drinking beer with friends than I do fretting about America's class system. It's just that when someone brings it up, I don't mind talking about it. And I think it's a good ongoing discussion to have.

gabneb sed: I also wonder who exactly the "American ruling class" is

An obvious answer, but you could start with anyone who qualifies for George W. Bush's "Ranger" status (people who have raised $200,000 or more for his re-election campaign), throw in Fortune's 400 richest list (or however many people are on it), anyone who sits on two or more boards of Fortune 500 companies, and assorted old-money families. They're not all Ivy League, but they are more often than not. They don't have a universal shared agenda either -- you've got your iconoclasts like Warren Buffett and even world's-richest-man Bill Gates, who doesn't really fit into any pre-existing mold. But the overall agenda and inclinations of the class are pretty clear. And they really don't like being called a "ruling class," or being called a class at all. As a rule, they venerate money and power and occupy themselves politically and professionally with the acquisition and retention of both.

Back to Deanna: What accomplishes a leap upward is lots and lots of hard work, and plenty of time living below your means, and saving saving saving, and living in a locale that doesn't make you feel like shit if you were born into poverty and ended up in the middle class.

All true enough. But some people start with more than others, and people who start more generally end up with more (our president being only the most embarassing example). A society truly concerned with fostering class fluidity takes steps to minimize or compensate for all manner of inequities, which is what the United States did for roughly 50 years in the middle of the last century, which corresponded with 50 years of middle-class growth and prosperity. Starting in the 1970s and accelerating into the Reagan era, we started to pull back from that leveling of assorted playing fields (even as more people were theoretically allowed to play, thanks to the Voting Rights Act and sex discrimination laws, etc.); Clinton slowed but didn't reverse that process, and Bush II has put it on full throttle to the extent that Jeb Bush can justify massive cuts in programs that help Florida's poorest and least able people by simply saying that in electing him, the state had opted for "personal responsibility" over group responsibility, and nobody thinks he's an amazingly greedy, selfish bastard for saying so.

There is also, of course, the question of what a society respects and rewards. My great-grandfather made himself a multimillionaire because he started a little chemical company and one of the guys who worked for him realized that one of their byproducts made for a good toilet-bowl cleaner, which led to the company eventually being bought by a larger company and then a larger one still (the product is still on your supermarket shelf, although our family interest in it ended long ago). That's all well and good and clean toilets are important, but are they more important than, say, educating children? My grandmother on the other side of the family taught 3rd grade for several decades and was beloved in her community for it, but she somehow never got to be a multimillionaire. All I'm saying is that financial reward does not necessarily go hand in hand with achievement, but our current economic structure behaves as if it does and gives increasing amounts of power over the control of the entire society to people who by some combination of birth, work and happenstance (and often a little manipulation along the way) end up with the most marbles. That ain't a classless society. It may not be classy, either, but it's certainly not classless.

Rich people are capitalists!

-- gareth (garet...), August 3rd, 2003.

there is access to higher education though. just about anyone with a high school diploma can go to a community college and work their way up from there to a junior college or a small state school if they want to or have a desire to. it's not Harvard, no, but it's a step and you can get a degree out of it that can certainly be useful in getting a job. the problem though is the poor state of so many high schools in depressed areas and their inability to provide for their students. lack of books, good teachers, a decent learning environment, etc. couple this with the many schools that are simply HAZARDOUS to a student's health and it goes a long way toward explaining the high drop-out rates and the lack of motivation to even get a diploma let alone go on to a 2 or 4 year university. it's an extreme problem here. kids in those situations need to be taught how to enjoy learning. to enjoy being in school. that day is a long way off.

Yeah yeah, but I think it's more like Capitalists -- I mean, I think you have to differentiate between people who engage in capitalism as part of the ebb and flow of daily life (i.e. all of us), and people who treat it as some kind of end in itself, a belief system. The conflation of Capitalism as a belief system with capitalism as a basic economic tool -- one that is useful for some things and less so for others -- is one of our abiding problems. Capital-C Capitalism confers special recognition and power on people who are good at practicing capitalism; it assumes that they are better, more successful people, and are therefore more fit to lead. There's a Divine Right-ish aura to it, like they've been selected by the God of Markets, elevated by the Invisible Hand, etc. (a mystical belief in the Invisible Hand is a core tenet of capital-C Capitalism). So rich people are Capitalists, or most of them are anyway. (Warren Buffett, interestingly, is an extremely skilled capitalist, but not much of a Capitalist.)

Hating people for the colleges they went to just seems silly to me, especially because the only people I ever see doing it tend to be people who went to Ivy or near-Ivy schools themselves. (I'll bet you'll find more people at Brown making statements like Milo's than you will on, say, the south side of Chicago.)

On the actual class issue: Dee, you've got to take into account the difference between class in the real economic sense and class in the "social" sense. Britian in particular, and some of Europe itself, has a definite sense of class as a social construction, something that doesn't exist as much in the U.S. But while we may think of ourselves as having that "social" class fluidity, we don't have it economically, at all. The obvious measure of class fluidity is how people's wealth comes out relative to their parents's wealth, and in the U.S., there's very little change: born poor, stay poor; born rich, stay rich. Canada, for instance, has significantly more class mobility than we do.

Sort of off-topic, but I think part of this has to do with American attitudes. We've always had this heavy (and I think originally anti-European) inclination to defend where we are, socially and economically: I can't think of any other nation where people seem to get such a kick out of bigging up whatever they are and telling everyone else to fuck off, where people put such a weird stress on the "authenticity" of sticking to their socio-economic roots. (Except, of course, for the embarrassed upper-middle class, who inevitably decide to just bash the rest of their class to death.) That's the social class division we have, and it's strange because it's so heavily self-imposed -- people are actively uncomfortable taking on different social-class roles. This can be a positive thing -- it can provide this pressure to disconnect economic status with social status, this huge American fixation on getting rich but not having it change anything about "who you are" (see: every movie ever made). Maybe in the UK you'll have other people to make a big deal out of your being a bit common -- in the US you make a big deal out of it yourself.

And, as I said, the value placed on an education at Harvard or NYU or wherever, combined with the fact that very few people not already of an upper-middle class or better background can get in, makes that cultural-gap between the haves and the have-nots wider.

Now, will a degree from State U. get you a decent office job in most places and a middle-class lifestyle? I'd venture a yes.

But what about kids from a working/lower-middle/etc. class background who want to write, or be filmmakers or artists?

Hating people for the colleges they went to just seems silly to me, especially because the only people I ever see doing it tend to be people who went to Ivy or near-Ivy schools themselves. (I'll bet you'll find more people at Brown making statements like Milo's than you will on, say, the south side of Chicago.)

Hold up, hoss. I've said nothing about 'hating' - or even disliking - anyone. (I've got too many friends who went to 'prestigious' schools to dislike any group without being a hypocrite.)

I called it one of my class-based frustrations.

When I first met a Ivy-grad friend at a party, he asked about where I went to school. He wasn't disdainful, but had a sort of disbelief that I seemed like an intelligent person and hadn't attended an Ivy league school.

And Tad, I never said graduates of those institutions can't be snobby.

yer dad sounds like me! (and i went to shitty rutgers, not snobby stanford.)

dubya went to yale and got his MBA from Harvard;
clarence thomas went to yale law;
john ashcroft went to u. chicago law

-- and i feel better because i do not in any way feel that those people are "superior" to me at all.

My parents were from a lower middle/working class background. I was lucky enough to go to one of the best schools in the world for animation, because I want to make films. I'm from the states & I went to school in Canada, so I can compare both societies. I'm also interested in economics, politics, existential-humanist type of philosophy/sociology- really amateur interest but I would say I'm socialist. I read most of Das Kapital & some more of the hard core science critique of capitalism. So anyway, I love this thread & very much agree that class matters more than ever.

I have a lot of things to compare between canada & the US.

1. health care. Up in canada i had an accident that led to an ambulance call. Totally free, and without that I might not have been able to finish school. Down in the states I had another accident that led to another ambulance call (shit luck eh?). It was so expensive, now I have debt that I can't pay, without years and years of the work experience that it's going to block for a while. All the constant investment, study & practice required for a sub-poverty artist income leaves no room for a day job. So working your way up won't happen if you get sick or something.

2. School. In canada it cost me 1/2-1/3 the price of the comparable schools in the US, even without the huge subsidy all canadians get. Plus, the schools in the states are so elite that they don't really accept people without lots of prior school. And no scholarships. Even with the luck of parents covering my tuition (income was enough to keep me from getting any subsidy), now I have 20 grand debt that has to be paid soon, from an artist income. The canadians who graduated with me are now planning years of extra study with their debts covered, making personal noncommercial films, or planning voyages of self-discovery or whatever the fuck on their free time. None of that for me. The funny thing is, coming from one of the best schools in the world for this profession- there's no freaking jobs. They've all gone to the orient with "free trade." So the only people with jobs are long-time vets, and those subsidized enough to be able to build their own.

3. Social & culture support. Well, some of these canadian friends took their work & put on a film festival. They got grants, access to public facilities, front page news coverage, free insurance. I took that same stuff & put on another film festival. I worked 3-4 jobs to do it at the same time, no support, the news media ignored it, use of public facilities was taken away, insurance doubled the cost of it, I started broke, earned thousands to fund it & ended broke. Old boys are the only ones who succeed at that. Luckily, up in canada they did so well with the same stuff, they got me a job, and good riddance to the shitty old USA. In a few decades shit's going to erode so hard it's going to be a 3rd world nation aside from that ultra-rich 1% of the old boys. Unless the revolution happens first.

Well, I can't get on here much so I wont answer anything but if youre reading this thanks for letting me bitch!

Also, education at many of these schools has more than doubled in the past fifteen years. Financial aid and scholarships used to be able to make up for that - they're able to do it less and less. Which means that those students who would have been eligible get pushed down into the next tier, and so on.

As it happens, I work in one of those cheaper schools, and we're graduating fewer and fewer of the working-class kids.

i saw a film called "the weather underground" in san francisco, a documentary by sam green and bill siegal that is well worth seeing bout "the weathermen" who broke off from the Students for Democratic Society in 69 and orchestrated a large number of bombings of government buildings (in which no one died, they just wanted to destroy the infrastructure). well one of their activists, Bernadine Dohrn (i think), was in the same class as john ashcroft at law school, according to what sam green said in the q&a that followed the movie. so social background and education can still lead to vastly different paths.
ashcroft should be committed though, somewhere with padded walls.

yeah i remember the guy criticising the weathermen, i could see his point up till about halfway thru, but once the weathermen dropped any violent aspirations towards other human beings, i sorta ended up siding with the weathermen in the end. mostly because i could understand their frustrations, the fact that peaceful protest (even large scale ones) can usually be so easily handled by the government, and these days sometimes corporate media too, and forgotten about (eg giant anti-war protests in london last year were just overlooked by blair, and the sad thing is he got away with it.). so i can understand their desire for destruction, their causes were usually noble, and they didnt kill anyone after the accident with the first bomb at the house. of course i also understand that bombings often only strengthen a governments resolve in the other direction and are unhelpful, but with that level of frustration, it was inevitable that people were gonna hit out. and getting back on topic, its interesting to see that the people who eventually did hit out were being taught at the same universities as the future powermongers. maybe seein these people at uni was part of what disgusted them, who knows...

Jesse's post about capital-C capitalism was totally ON. This is a real trend both in America and Britain, where people with no political axe to grind are increasingly adopting the 'the rich' = 'superior' because, at least down to the property-owning classes, enough meritocracy has occurred to cause these people to believe (mistakenly, obv) that most current wealth is the result of hard work on some parent or grandparent's part, regardless of racial or ethnic origin - so the playing field must therefore be flat as a bowling green. Hell, worked for *them*, right? Anyone who disagrees with this or points out continued inequality between races, classes and sexes across the board is either:

A Hata - less rich and famous/successful and therefore jealous as default setting
'Political' - some kind of boring whinger who wants to be paid for out of taxes (see 'liberal' in US)
Setting themselves up to bang head against glass ceiling forever, as if all inequality is somehow because of complainants
Poor and angry - the worst things you can be.

When I went away to college I discovered the way the American class system works in the places American power elites actually are, and it's just as rockist as the British one in the sense that money and origins or a combination with these and snob-appeal/glamour tend to really turn the cranks of the aspirational middle classes and the rich who want to keep on being the focus of people's aspirations (it feels good to be admired, ask anyone - it's also comforting to be on the radar of interesting hatas if you are a more ironic sort of richo). You can even be found wanting in class terms because of your accent!

The difference between the British and American manifestations of class is that British people use humour to both diffuse and discuss the issue - and most people know exactly where they are in relation to everyone else (at very least the whole nation can pinpoint the class of a white person). To soften an attack on another's class origins, whatever degree of snobbery, people also tend to oversimplify or panto-play their own in an ironic fashion (see every comment ever about shower time at boys' boarding schools). I find the British nation as a whole doesn't do the same with black or Asian people, both because it's a representation issue and because people from that background are in many ways more like their American counterparts than their neighbours in experiencing some degree of point-of-entry hardship or perceived disadvantage (inc. patronising 'brown person = poor, uneducated, religious' default setting) common to all who migrate to a nation once its pecking order has become well-established. But that's a slight digression.

Americans don't want to believe in class, mainly due to nationalist mythmaking about America being all about toppling the aristocracy when in fact the non-inheriting sons of those aristocrats and black marketeers settled here and didn't want to pay taxes. As families became entrenched here they adopted many of the same affectations as signs of their civility, enlightenment and sense of being one of the Elect. Secularize that officially (but bang on about God when convenient, in breach of Constitution) and you get meritocratic elitism and new forms of feudalism people are very much in denial about. I invested enough in the idea of going to a top school to work my ass off to get there, and my slightly Gatsbyish background made that a sensible thing to do because changing things at the top is way less hassle than arguing with your suburban neighbours/parents about anyone called Bush. And I don't think my mom could have afforded the honors or journo school at the University of Minnesota anyway (I didn't apply for merit scholarships because of the possibility of financial aid screwover in sophomore year because few run over four years).

I honestly think British kids have a much better chance of going to the 'good schools' than their American counterparts, because it's obvious in a smaller country what those places are. The application process itself is central, unlike in the US where applications are made to each college separately and *no* US college is cheaper than Oxbridge is to British citizens. also free healthcare and no middle-class shame in collecting unemployment while you wait (unless your folks are too rich to countenance you taking money off the state because others need it, hence trustafarians phenomenon in international cities). It is less obvious to regionally-centred Americans what their options truly are and it is possible to go to a top school in the region, and either enter the job market where you grew up or go to somewhere more nationally recognised for grad studies. Community and state colleges do need support but should not offer students bullshit degrees; any money spent on education is expensive to someone who's never had to pay for it. Some people - generally those from more moneyed/professional/academic origins, but not always - need a more inter/national choice appropriate to their studies or aspirations. It's a given that those places are oversubscribed and an elite happens, but equally it is essential to shift affirmative action to means-based consideration rather than doing a racially-based head count which might just be barring poor students with similar origins.

Well, yeah, the elite happens, but at least the widening of intake would take some of the slippage off the ol' greasy pole without having to suck on it.

Dan to thread now, please?

Blount, yr being a dick.

That wasn't so much my point as that the Wal-Mart/Target divide is one of the few visible class divides in a lot of parts of the country.

Unless they have a television.

even if what you said was true for britain, why assume the same for italy or france?

I'd actually assume (on no info) that if it isn't true for France, it at least was at some point: they are obviously the nation that gave us "nouveau riche".

See also that great statistic that 19% of Americans would describe themselves as being in the top 1% financially.

"When Gallup updated its question on social class in early April, 1 percent of respondents said they belonged in the upper class, 17 percent in the upper-middle class, 46 percent in the middle class, 28 percent in the working class, and 7 percent in the lower class."

"Oh my God, your brother went to Choate? What year?"

"Dude my sister went to [another private New England boarding school], I bet she knows you!!"

Cue Tracer sitting on dormitory bed, mouth dry from the 12-hour car trip from Tennessee, mentally going "gaaaaaaaaah." It was alienating, and though most people grew out of those explicit networks, they had also already established what sorts of people and attitudes they were comfortable with, even before they'd taken a single class. Brown was the next natural step. For me it was like another planet.

The European kids had another kind of network, based on not working at anything ever and wearing more fashionable clothes than everyone else. I mean think about it, they would rather pay thru the nose for Brown than go to the top skools in Europe for FREE (I am assuming they had the grades)?? The art kids had their network, too, but it was more sui generis and more egalitarian in a way, based as it was on how well you could bullshit and con other people (tho obviously it helps if the conner knows the world of his mark). Other people had tiny informal study networks, lunch-partner networks, drinking networks, theater networks. After university, all these networks remained in play to whatever extent you were actually interested in them in the first place, whether you kept in touch, etc.

One thing we could all agree on was that Harvard kids were raging control freaks.