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Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.0 KB | 125 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 70

Double-Talk About "Class"


By Barbara Ehrenreich


    With all the attention to Bill Clinton's sex life, few
have noticed a far more serious transgression on the part of
the candidates. They are tossing around the word class, as in
middle class, in total defiance of the venerable cliche: class
is America's "dirty little secret," anything really dirty being,
in our culture, not exactly a secret. But here they are,
blithely breaking our 200-year-old taboo on the mention of class
and using "middle class" as a modifier for dozens of terms like
tax cuts, values and even revolution.

    Perhaps they mean no harm. After all, if they really
wanted to run roughshod over convention, they might have gone
for the more muscular "working class" or even dusted off the
dread "proletariat." Middle class is the wimpiest term in the
lexicon of social taxonomy, meaning little more than not rich,
not poor. Ask what class we're in, and we all shrug modestly and
say, "Middle, you know, like everyone else."

    Or perhaps the politicians are speaking in code. Codes
have long been a part of the etiquette of political discourse:
"welfare" for African Americans, "fairness" for tax the rich,
"family values" for oat-based cereals and heterosexuality. When
those on the political right first test-ran middle class as a
conservative poster child, all they really seemed to mean by it
was "normal," a code for white and not poor -- anyone else being
a member of the supposedly profligate underclass that was
dragging our nation down. Even when uttered by Democrats, middle
class often sounds like a mealymouthed way of saying, "Us, and
not them," where them includes poor people, snake handlers and
those with pierced tongues.

    But surely our candidates are aware of the risks involved
in breaking our 200 years of silence on the subject of class.
For the first century or so, the whole concept of class was
derided as something foreign and decadent, along the same lines
as male cologne, and inappropriate to a nation with an open
frontier. Mention of the word could get you strung up or shunned
by the politically correct. Later, in the 1950s, use of the word
class joined vegetarianism and folk dancing as one of many
telltale signs of communist leanings. Hence Senator Philip
Gramm's recent denunciation of the Democrats as latter-day
communists, "trying to create the same class struggle that
failed in the Soviet Union."

    For most of us far less ideological folks, mention of
class seems, well, borderline rude. We may not be
class-conscious, but we're plenty status-conscious and capable
of deconstructing the subtle difference between, say, Bud Light
and Chardonnay or polyester and natural fiber. But where a
European might see actual social classes, we tend to see only
winners and losers, which is why any serious talk of class
always has the sting of that ancient zinger: If you're so smart,
why ain't you rich?

    So the candidates had better have a very good reason for
raising a topic that is so vulgar, upsetting and unpatriotic.
I suggest that if challenged, they fall back on the defense
already employed by various well-heeled felons that "the '80s
made me do it." It was in the '80s, after all, that the rich got
richer, and the poor took to camping out on concrete. Class
became harder to ignore than those block-long stretch limos that
scatter the common folk as they cruise down the streets.

    And in the '80s a funny thing happened to the middle
class, meaning, roughly, those who inhabit the middle of the
income-distribution curve. If a middle-class life-style is
defined by home ownership, vacations in Orlando and college for
the kids, then a middle-size income was shrinking to the level
of an inadequate pittance. While the price of housing and
tuition went shooting through the roof, the median household
income remained stuck where it has been ever since the late
'70s, at about $30,000 a year. The curious result being that if
you want to be middle class in the old-fashioned suburban sense,
you need to be pretty near rich.

    Our candidates can be forgiven, then, for breaking the
taboo on the mention of class. But now that they've gone this
far, why not take the rest of the marbles out of their mouths
and refrain from using middle class as a muffled code meaning
not poor? After all, the middle class has achieved celebrity
status on account of its relative poverty, so those who live in
absolute poverty should be at least as deserving of a
politician's fleeting attention. A mortgage may be a crippling
burden, but it beats having no home at all.

    Besides, hardly anyone believes the old Reagan-era canard
that it's the poor who are dragging us down. When a
TIME/Yankelovich Clancy Shulman poll asked which groups are
getting "too much" and "too little" from the Federal Government,
79% said the lower class, home of the fabled deadbeats and
welfare cheats, is getting too little, and a startling 75%
blamed the upper class for hogging more than its share. Out of
deference to popular sentiment then, the candidates ought to
start addressing themselves in a more ecumenical fashion, to
"the poor and the middle class."

    Ah, but think what would happen if we cast that one last
taboo aside and acknowledged that the real political equation
might be the rich vs. the rest of us! George Bush would no doubt
continue to complain, in ever shriller tones, about the dangers
of "envy and divisiveness." Pat Buchanan, Clinton and other faux
men of the people would have to admit that their assets place
them securely within the Porsche-driving class. And the rest of
us, especially in the vague middle strata, would have to toss
out our lottery tickets and knuckle down for the struggle for
national health care and a few other measures to redistribute
the wealth.

    But this is what comes of breaking taboos. Where are you,
Ms. Flowers? Let's go back to sex.