gentlemen versus players

also a discush i had w.sistrah becky a few weeXoRz back when i'd just read THE OWL SERVICE: the posh family in OS make class assumptions abt Gwyn which are — i think — literally unsayable in ordinary media today

=> and i think masscult tim-hatred lives on the back of an awareness of this. He does nothing to dispel it, mind you, but the point i'm making is that i think HIS world and HIS assumptions — "you can mend yr own shoes = you are a shit" — no longer rule the world, as they clearly still DID in 1924, but are still considered a threat and arouse enormous, almost pre-emptive hostility.

I was trawling for other examples — esp.present-day examples — but so far no one has cited any.

Q: What's the difference between a gentleman and a player?
A: A gentleman sticks his dick in her mouth BEFORE he sticks it in her ass.

(roll credits)

ktee that is sort of what i mean, yes: what intrigues me is that, since the 60s, "posh culture" loosely speaking is somewhat on the back-foot defensive in the UK

i am of an age and background to be somewhat — when i don't catch myself — kneejerk anti-"propah kulcher", at least in the sense of its Self-Evident Superiority (i remember kerry quite properly beating me up for my catch-call academia-disdain on a momus-thread long ago, when it's not as if i didn't benefit myself from same somewhat)

not that anyone is abt to mistake me for liam gallagher possibly

haha it's all abt IMMANENT CRITIQUE (as jade wd say)

I think I was tring to say that poshery is a vvf complex and striated thing. Which is obv I suppose, but it's key to identify which brand of posh you're thinking about. We have a class system to maintain, after all.

well in a moral sense, yes. but in a practical sense, no!

Okay, so: one half of the entirely-justifiable taking-down of the archaic hereditary gentry/elite involved this egalitarian approach to natural rights and values and ethics -- it said, basically, "your membership in this oligarchic elite doesn't make you a better person than me; I am a human being and I am just as clever and capable and deserving as you, and in fact possibly more so insofar as I understand the hardworking moral lives of salt-of-Earth 'real people.'" This half, though, enveloped the whole movement against elites: in fact, since the hereditary nature of wealth and power didn't completely change, it overtook the thinking entirely. It ceased to be about egalitarianism or meritocracy and instead reduced itself to dismissal: suddenly it was "we are the Real People living Real Honest Lives and you are spoiled snobby weaklings with poor ridiculous ideas." (This is the bedrock of the entire American personality, nurtured with regard to Europe, sustained by the frontier, and confirmed every time a heartland conservative goes on and on about an "east-coast liberal elite.")

What was completely forgotten in this process was the material aspect of the elite. As the quest to "morally" equalize the common with the elite transformed into a quest to paint the common as better than the elite, broad thinking neglected the very thing that was worst about the elite in the first place: that they had all the good stuff -- wealth, influence, education, intellectual opportunity, and the comfort and leisure time to exploit each of them, and they were given these things based solely on heredity. The bigging-up of the proletariat at some point started to involve looking upon these things as a choice: if you're trying to cast yourself as salt-of-the-Earth above the elite, it's necessary to say that you elect to be that way, and that you'd actively decline to change it. In this broad-thinking process you basically discount and forsake all of the things that made the elite an elite in the first place: you write off all of their preferences as snobbery-related as opposed to considering that they had the wealth and opportunity to behave and consume however they wanted, and they chose some of their behaviors and consumptions because those things really were the best available to them.

Hence this fascinating phenomenon -- especially in the US -- where people aspire to wealth and power but defiantly cling to their "common" tastes and thinking based on what is essentially a long-standing prejudice against the trinkets and opportunities that used to be available only to the hereditary elite: this is how you get the guy driving around in the million dollar pickup truck.

On some level what's at stake is Pierre Bourdieu's whole thing about culture basically being created by class -- creating separate traditions that are as early-ingrained as national or ethnic traditions -- but I think even that in itself was created. It would appear to me that, historically, the commoners have aspired to be elite far more than today -- because that was where the good stuff was -- whereas now, there's this very interesting attempt to partake in the personal power of the elite (wealth, prestige) while culturally and behaviorally pitting onesself against it (and then fretting endlessly at the cognitive dissonance this causes: this is remarkably similar to fretting over whether bands are "selling out" or not).

Alan Jackson explained! But who can explain Vince McMahon?