> What looks like relative prosperity to you looks like loser-town to the
> average American who is bombarded every ten minutes with some notion of
> something else he could/should/ought to have.
Yeah, that's what I meant too. But I don't think it has to sound like they're all just idiot dupes of some image industry. Are we really going to argue that the poor white people that Wotjek is talking about don't lack things they could have -- in their social context -- if the world worked differently?
> You see, if you have been
> brought up in Europe (which includes eastern europe) and you are educated,
> you probably have a wealth of inner resources that are not available to the
> average American who basically has TV and his TV-addled family.
Please let's not pretend television is at fault here, either. I can't help find this overwhelmingly patronising. My family may not be a field of world- shattering geniuses, but many of them are rich and complex people, and I don't know that shallowness is a preserve of the poor or the American. Amongst the close members of my family are Norwegians, and English and Irish men, and i guess they count as European. It's not only insulting but wrong to presume that poverty or non-European-ness are any kind of index for not being "addled" or for having "inner resources". Wasn't Wotjek adding arrogance to his list of offensive qualities?
> And, by the
> same token, you measure success in other than material terms. Also, don't
> forget -- never forget -- how hard Americans work and how little energy
> they have left at the end of the day. They know they've been robbed, they
> believe that being working-class in this country means being a loser, they
> believe that everyone has the chance to "make it" and making it means
> having lots of shit. So, I guess they have to blame someone that they can
> lord it over.
I don't know a whole lot of working class Americans, that's for sure, but I doubt Australia's quite so radically different as all that, and I don't think workingclass people overwork themselves. I work a damn sight harder now than I did when my jobs were not "middle-class", and I care a hell of a lot more about what I do. Most working class people I know don't much like their jobs (though that's not always true) and they do only what they have to. I get ridiculed at home for caring about my job and for not taking leave whenever I can.
> I don't know cause I don't know people like that. I went out to dinner a
> couple of nights ago at my local Chinese restaurant and sat next to a
> longish table accommodating an extended white family celebrating the
> birthday of their college-bound son. The father was holding forth about how
> we lost the war in VietNam because of the liberal media. It was Walter
> Cronkite's fault because of his presentation of the Tet offensive. I kept
> listening ...to try and make sense of the psychology, but I couldn't. I saw
> a lot of self-satisfaction, anger, resentment. I noticed that the women in
> the family said almost nothing throughout dinner. I noted a certain level
> of anxiety/nervousness that seemed unwarranted given the circumstances...
> Beats me.
Obviously you can't judge this table full of people because the dad is a dick. Just the idea of you sitting there trying to work out their psychology is really disturbing, or something.
I might have been at that table, thinking -- please let me not bite off aunty ruth's head; and please let nan not tell sean he should join the army again; but all of this is better than dissecting the paternity of my neices one more time; and what will happen if i offer to pay and why do i want to anyway; and christ this food is terrible, and knowing the diatribe (probably my uncle) is really (indirectly and futilely but with a real measure of honest concern) addressed to my cousin who won't get a "proper" job and lives off his wife and that he votes labor anyway despite the rhetoric; and any amount of things that you would never know and maybe not get.
I grant you every trip home has a good chance of feeling like some weird sort of participant observation, and i don't have much in common with most of them, and they think i'm crazy, or possibly threatening, but without some measure of comprehending who they are and what they need and fear you're only going to filter that table of people through your own set of very limited images.
Catherine
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