At 02:12 PM 6/28/2007, you wrote:
>On 6/28/07, Chuck <chuck at mutualaid.org> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > At least with Sicko, Moore is covering the middle class and not slumming
> > around trying to pretend he is a working person.
>
>
>I am not sure what this means.
>
>I always assumed that Moore was slumming when he was pretending to be a
>counter-culture newspaper editor or a writer or a television producer or a
>movie director. In other words he was a guy with a working class
>inferiority complex striving to be a middle class intellectual pretending to
>be working class. It is a strategy you see over and over again with British
>playwrites and novelists. It is a strategy most common in the U.S. in an
>ethnic or a racial context. A first generation Italian-American or Eastern
>European Jew, barely rid of his/her immigrant accent and a bunch of peasant
>superstition pretends be a "real" middle class American "intellectual" and
>then pretends to be "just" a first generation Italian-American or Eastern
>European Jew. Crossing class and ethnic divides always bring about such
>identity crises. Since the mid-80s, if you will notice, it's a strategy
>used by many of us born in declining industrial towns, raised in lower
>middle class neighborhoods where everybody was getting laid-off from General
>Motors (Flint) or General Electric (Schenectady). In such neighborhoods
>reading books was a little odd and a bit "uppity", so such people grow up a
>bit alienated from their own working class roots, but not willing to reject
>them. It is the "class" context that is unfamiliar to most United
>Statsians, where as it is very common among most Britishers, and as I said a
>strategy many of us from such backgrounds use. Lower middle class or
>working class, the first to go to college from our families, intellectually
>inclined among a deteriorating working class culture, and also, wishing to
>be an "intellectual" while unwilling to reject your past and thus
>"pretending" to be working class or lower middle class, like everyone else
>in the family.
>
>And what is your point? Who are you pretending to be when you write like
>this?
>
>Jerry
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