My parents were rich, then poor, then middle class during my life. My father both made and lost a fortune in his thirties and forties. I went to an elite private school, paid for partially by the UN. Then, I spent my twenties poor, often ill, and, on occasion, was only saved from the street by the kindness of friends.
When I think of class issues, I think of them in terms of corridors. In every gleaming office tower, they are there, in every upscale marble, glass, and steel mall—they are there. They are dark concrete, engrimed, lit by harsh fluorescent lights behind steel cages, streaked with the residue of years of waste. They are the corridors that the service staff use: the maintenance staff, the cleaners, the truck drivers, the blue collar guys who cart the heavy boxes and fixtures around. They are ugly, and often they stink.
The most disgusting set of corridors I ever encountered was in the Chateau Laurier. For those who don’t know, the Chateau Laurier is an old hotel connected by tunnels to Parliament Hill in Ottawa itself. It is one of the hearts of power in Canada. And the sub-basement has a smell that is something between rotten meat and acrid cheese with something acid and chemical cutting through it. I quite literally gagged the day I delivered food meant for the gullets of the rich to the old majestic Chateau, that magnificent palace whose opulent restaurants are but feet from a stench laid down for decades.
It’s that squalor that underlies the worlds of both opulence and sterility–the opulence of the upper class, the sterility of the middle classes’ office buildings. It’s those corridors in which those who earn little more, and sometimes less, than minimum wage work. For Lord save the clean, little people–in their white shirts and ties, their buffed oxfords, and their clean fingernails–save them from seeing the people who do the work that keeps their white walled world clean and running, the people who keep the air conditioning and the heat on, the carpets clean, and the light fixtures working.
The trolls come out at night as the offices empty. Once the daytime denizens are gone, they come scurrying out from their tunnels and are allowed to move through the offices; so as not to offend the others with the sight of their sweating for a living or dealing with dirt and garbage. And when the daytime denizens do see you, if you are one of those night-time trolls, they don’t see you. Their eyes don’t track you, they move right over you as if you were a piece of moving furniture—an appliance. They will only approach reluctantly if they need something. After they’ve gotten what they wanted, whacked the machinery, as it were, you usually find you’ve gone back to being an invisible appliance with whom eye contact is to be avoided at all costs. And you are paid in scraps. For your labor, you receive a pittance compared to those whose fingernails are clean, whose work involves the strain of typing on a keyboard, attending meetings, and picking up the phone.
That’s my second world, that world of tunnels. It’s a world I inhabit no longer, but it’s a world that haunts me, that I know exists alongside the antiseptic office world. Those corridor dwellers are the ones whose labor makes that new, office world possible—they are the trolls of the modern world, who come out at night, or who scurry through tunnels in the day, never to be seen by those whom their work supports. If seen, they must be ignored.
And they are.
And so I listen to John Edwards and I marvel that he dares speak of the unspeakable, of the great fear—not just of the middle class, but of all Americans. For we choose not to look at that which we fear. It’s not that we fear the working poor, or their humbler cousins, the broken, those who don’t even have job, much less a bad job. What we fear in them is that we might see people like ourselves.
For, to feel secure, in our beautiful world, we must believe that there is something fundamental that makes us different from the poor and the broken. We must think, “Ah, but I’m smarter,” or “I work much harder,” or, less gratifying but still good, “I have a better eduation than they do.”
We must think, then, “I am more valuable than them, I am different, what happened to them could never happen to me! I’m different! I am!”
We cannot see them as humans like us. That many of them work hard, or worked hard when they were allowed to. That most are not stupid, and that many are no worse educated than we. (And isn’t that the easiest thing to fix anyway? As though if everyone had a high school diploma, or a B.A., or a Ph.D., there would be jobs for them all.)
But I worked among them, lived among them, was one of them, and I know they work as hard, indeed harder, than most of the soft office workers whose lives they make easy. And I remember the screams from the soft, pampered bewildered sots when something went wrong in their pristine worlds and their inability to pick up a heavy box, or use a plunger on a toilet, or confront someone violent. Oh, yes, they disdained the goblins, but they’d coming running for our help fast rather than soil those soft hands.
And yes, this sounds bitter. And yes, it is. And yet, I’ve long moved on from that world. My hands are the soft ones now, I’ve not picked up a shovel in over a decade.
But I don’t think that what I do is somehow innately more deserving than someone who cleans toilets for a living, or who sits at a security desk and patrols to make people safe, or who digs ditches, or who… but why go on, make your own list of the underpaid and under-appreciated.
And so I listen to John Edwards and I know why he lost twice. People don’t like you when you make them look at the other side, at the dark fate that may await them one day if they’re a little unlucky; if their company downsizes, if they’re 45 and the company wants a youngster, or if some guy in China is willing to do their job for one-tenth the wage.
Like the way the middle class says about death “she passed away,” we don’t want to look firmly in the face of poverty and see that the face is our face, that its fate echoes ours. If seen, it must be ignored.
Mustn’t it?
(A Reprint, and now kicked back to the top from 2010 re-publication.)
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bystander
Powerful and compelling stuff, Ian. I wonder when you first wrote this if, as you indicate, it’s a reprint. Beautifully said.
FkDahl
Ian, being from Sweden, but now living in the US, with a lot of time spent in Canada… I am struck by how dirty and depressing “the bowels” of hotels and similar buildings are here in NA. On the other hand (I’m an engineer in the semiconductor industry) my office is pretty darn depressive – a metal box with flaking paint … now window – of course no window – they are for the managers …. all in all a huge contrast to working environments in Sweden … (cue IKEA commersial)
jo6pac
Hello Ian
Thanks for the complaint until lately I was one of those people that did the work at night or early morning and very few appreciated what we did. Then the 4 man crew was outsourced and if you wanted a job you could work for them at lower pay. I was lucky in that I’m 61 and live close to the ground. I received a small severance package that includes benefits and unemployment and I can live on this. It always amazes me when I’m dressed up who will talk to me thinking I’m one of them. Then I say what I do for a living and it’s like I’m not there, always good for a laugh. A good friend of mine gets the same treatment from his clients, he’s a contractor/carpenter and one customer would follow him around and tell how smart he was compared to my friend. Then on the last day of the job my friend ask what degree he had, oh a master he said and then my friend explained to him he had 2 masters degrees and BA and please make sure you pay the bill on time. Oh well time to run.
Drunk Pundit
“We must think, then, “I am more valuable than them, I am different, what happened to them could never happen to me! I’m different! I am!””
It’s a rather uncomfortable thing to think that your well being is due to dumb luck and circumstance. Rationalizations are the easiest of lies told to ourselves.
The Raven
Good stuff. You seem to have lived in places with hard class distinctions.
A few years ago I moved from Portland, which has moderate class distinctions, to Seattle, which has relatively strong ones. In Portland, you are more likely to have to warn people not to pick up things they can’t manage! In Seattle, though…if I wear jeans, a t-shirt, and a duck-billed cap, I look like a middle-aged carpenter. Dressed like that, different people talk to me, different people ignore me. I hadn’t been used to it, and it was startling.
The state of Washington also has the most regressive taxes in the USA; Oregon is more moderate. On average, a Washington household would have to make $80,000/year before its per-capita taxes were lower than the same household in Oregon. It’s not just fortune that creates class distinction; it’s policy.
One of the strongest policy-based class distinctions in the USA is between people who have the right to work, and those who don’t. In much of the western USA, much of the physical labor is done by undocumented immigrants who can’t talk back to their bosses for fear of deportation. It’s a toxic situation for any number of reasons, and one the USA so far isn’t willing to address compassionately and realistically. (My old article on this.)
KZK
Not really all that different from the Indian caste system.
Ian Welsh
Now that I think about it, this was originally written during the 2004 primaries, and started, then with Edwards “Two Americas” speech. So this is an old piece.
alyosha
What was interesting about Edwards (setting aside the man’s all-too-human weaknesses that later imploded his life), was how the powers-that-be treated him. They made fun of his hair for weeks on end, completely ignored his ideas, and did their subtle best to suck all the oxygen out of his campaign. They toyed with him essentially.
Had he been able to turn this toying around, had he been able to be a powerful voice for the powerless, a la Martin Luther King (to name an example), or even able to work miracles (like Jesus Christ) the attacks would’ve scaled up dramatically, probably resulting in an assasination. Their mode of marginalizing Edwards was the soft treatment, proportionate to the threat, and it worked.
I’ve never felt that the rich were more deserving, although I’ve heard that self-righteous (and preposterous) argument many times. I am not Bill Gates rich, not even local-doctor or local merchant rich, but by the standards of many in my town (Los Angeles) I am very wealthy. I have a roof over my head and food in the fridge, clean water, and live in an area that is relatively safe. I was born into a working/middle class family in the most prosperous era (the 1950s-60s) of the most prosperous country on the planet at the time. Like many of my class, I was able to go to college, a gigantic public university, often the first in our families. I don’t consider myself deserving, just lucky. Extremely lucky in so many ways. One of my spiritual teachers says all of this was earned through hard work in past lives…I tend to agree, but it doesn’t matter. It comes out as being lucky in this lifetime.
Your reprint is timely for me. I saw a movie last night on the Sundance channel, “Liberty Kid”, which was about two young men from the underclass in New York City. The movie was set in a hardscrabble world much like you described, far away from the antiseptic pleasant spaces that ride on top of it. It wasn’t easy for me to watch it, because the entire setting reeked of tension, fear, and strife. Entire lifetimes spent in this tough environment.
The people who inhabit the pleasant spaces, and who treat the underclass like trolls do so out of fear. Fear that everything they have could be lost, if they dare in some way share what they have. Fear in knowing that despite their many advantages, they are incredibly weak, and wouldn’t stand a chance in a fight with these people who have had to scrap for everything their entire lives.
My spirituality is much broader than Christianity, but Luke 12:48 is a verse that has always spoken to me: “From those to whom much has been given, much is expected”. It (along with many similar verses from the new testament as well as wisdom from many other teachers) provides the spiritual basis for why I am a liberal. As I explained, my upbringing was extremely fortunate, and not only do I practically know that the world becomes a better place when this fortune (in its many forms) is shared, thus benefitting me and everyone else, I know that someday I will have to answer for all that has been given to me (loaned to me actually) – what did I do with it? Did I hoard it out of fear, and make bogus rationalizations for why I deserve it? Get real.
Katie Svoboda
Beautifully written and says so much. I have felt that John was taken down for his message and not his behavior. There are too many that exhibited this type of behavior that have gotten a complete pass.
John
Back corridors for the servants was an architectural introduction of Victorian England for the insecure and aspiring noveau riche industrialists of the time. The houses were so designed and the servants below a certain level were instructed that they never be seen by those whom they were serving. Adequate back corridors and hidden stairs were designed into the building just for this purpose. I have read that at least some chambermaids were dismissed because they were seen by their masters.
The old aristos lived in their 18th Century and earlier houses (palaces) where everyone traversed from room to room without corridors or everyone shared the same corridors and stairs.
Architectural expression of class status is a fascinating subject.
I just saw the George Clooney film, Up in the Air, and the director of that film used corridors to say a lot about isolation, alienation and class differentiation.
Ian Welsh
I didn’t know that about 19th century architecture. Fascinating. Thanks John.
beowulf
Ian
And so I listen to John Edwards and I marvel that he dares speak of the unspeakable…
alyosha
Had he been able to turn this toying around, had he been able to be a powerful voice for the powerless, a la Martin Luther King (to name an example), or even able to work miracles (like Jesus Christ) the attacks would’ve scaled up dramatically, probably resulting in an assassination.
These two comments brought to mind a book I’m reading now, James W. Douglass’s “JFK and The Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why he Matter”. In the introduction he quotes from a letter written by Thomas Merton 10 months before the Cuban Missile Crisis:
“What is needed is really not shrewdness or craft, but what politicians don’t have: depth, humanity and a certain totality of self-forgetfulness and compassion, not just for individuals but for man as a whole, a deeper kind of dedication. Maybe Kennedy will break through into that some day by a miracle. But such people are long before marked out for assassination.:” (p. xiv.)
b.
Morlocks, not trolls.
As for Edwards, judging from his 2004 performance he was (and possibly still is, despite the repeated and excessive shocks to his system) largely a scam, from the same mold as Obama, but without the establishment endorsement – admitteldy due to him responding to the need to differentiate by an increasingly elaborate message the implications of which challenged the establishment; a self-reinforcing dynamics. I have my doubts that this would have turned out to be The Education of Franklin Delano Edwards, in the end.
Get over the Savior reflex. Some of The Candidates are less sunworthy than others (see Dean, same need to differentiate in the primaries, somewhat more authentic if still dominantly system-conservative foundation to build upon), but one of the fundamental flaws of the US political system is that it is a Pageant of the Unfittest. Nobody who should be stuck with The Job wants it, anybody who runs disqualifies himself.
B Schram
Ian,
thanks again for such a thought provoking post. I too have seen the class standard from different angles. Living in DC class bias was a very palpable reality, I am so grateful to be back in the midwest where I am free of most of it. My reason for posting is in response to b., what wonderful cynicism! Seriously, I too clung to the hope that Edwards, because I liked what he said, was somehow associated with his message. Your comments reminded me that they are essentially actors playing a part to get elected. From Edwards actions post-election, I am glad he didn’t get elected. It would have been far more disappointing than what we got (who I never believed in the first place).
Zach
That smell, what the hell is it? Pungent, sour, acrid, biting, impossible to identify. It smells like bile tastes.
The only other place Ive ever found it is around the large green dumpsters parked behind food-service establishements, in the summertime.
Tal Hartsfeld
Everyone exists in some kind of a microcosmic bubble.
And think that whatever subtextual environment they exist in is either the norm …or, if not the “norm”, “above the average/mediocre”.
sidd
There is a stanza whose author I have not been able to find.
“Under bridges hobo’s travel
Eating only rocks and gravel.
When a hobo dies, nobody knows
Under the bridge the gravel grows.”
Does anyone know the author ?
sidd
Bill Bruneau
Well said and well written. Three comments for you:
1. I grew up from childhood in a modest and isolated Saskatchewan village. We used to say our village was classless, since everyone was poor. But we were wrong. For one thing, there was a village M.D., two ministers of the gospel who lived rent-free in manses, and the secretary-treasurer of the municipality: all these folks enjoyed a kind of social security, even if their remuneration was tiny, even by the standards of the 1950s. Then there were the 30% of the village who lived well below the radar, certainly below the (already very low) Saskatchewan poverty line. But it’s interesting and intriguing to notice that each of us 300 persons were visible–there was no subterranean village, we all smelled alike, and so on. The physical distance in the Château Laurier between the upper and lower orders was maybe 10 feet–but it might as well have been 10 miles or light years, socially speaking. Redistribution of wealth would not resolve the problems of unfairness and arbitrariness that infect the Château Laurier–something has to be done about the physical distancing, too. I guess I’m calling for a big cultural shift, not just an economic one. This blog post took me back….
2. I loathe the phase “passed away.” I hadn’t thought carefully of my reasons for disliking this euphemism. This post goes some way to suggesting good reasons for preferring good old-fashioned English: X _died_ yesterday, etc. Thanks for writing as you did.
3. This blog is strongly reminiscent of George Orwell’s _Down and Out in London and Paris_, right down to the description of the smells in hotel basements and kitchens. You may know this book already, but if you don’t, then you’re in for a treat.
Steeleweed
There may be exceptions, but I have long noted an inverse relationship between income and effort: the higher the income, the less work a person actually performs. The janitor works a damn sight harder than the CEO. Always.
I recall in the ’60s when I was working terrible hours – 140/week for months – I would encounter the maintenance staff regularly simply because I was in my office nearly 24×7. They often apologized for ‘bothering’ me – they had learned that the white-collar workers preferred them to be invisible and they assumed I felt that way. I did eventually become friends with one or two, but it was tentative on their part, as if they couldn’t be sure they really trusted me.
I grew up in a culture that did not make much distinction between the college professor and the coal miner, the millionaire ranch owner and his Mexican cook. If there was one manta I heard consistently, it was that “There’s no disgrace in an honest work.”
My mother had been a newspaper reporter and editor and Clerk of the County Court.
She later applied for a job as custodian of the County Court House. It was understood that I would be shoveling coal to the boiler, mowing the grass and cleaning the sidewalks and things that were physically beyond her. Mother would simply be doing the cleaning. The County Commissioners were hesitant about giving the job to a woman. It wasn’t so much that they questioned her ability to keep the place clean. I think they just felt the job was ‘beneath’ a person of her background, education and abilities. Her response basically slapped them upside the head and shamed them. She got the job.
I think it’s worse today in that the middle class can no long be confident of their own secure place in the cosmos. Having an example of ‘this could be you’ staring them in the face is disconcerting to people whose self-image is based on income, possessions and power.
Spinoza
@Zach
You would be surprised at the filth and terrible food quality at your average restaurant or fast food joint! Most of it is bare bones crap from our warehouses, prepared with apathy, and served with resentment. Oh, we try to take pride in what we do, obsessing over a finely wrought meal, despite the constant message from the culture that “burger flippers” are not hard workers but stupid and lazy failures. If we didn’t, many of us would probably hang ourselves.
montanamaven
I guess it’s time to read Kathi Weeks’ book “The Problem with Work” instead of just skimming it. I started to read it a couple years ago, but it is quite dense. So a bit difficult for my attention span.
But I did read an excellent book that I found at a college bookstore in New Orleans. “Faces Along the Bar” by Madelon Powers is a vivid description of the Saloon era from 1870 to 1920. Saloons were called the working man’s club and in the backrooms they plotted how to gain more leisure time. Even Samuel Gompers said that the one issue that all working men and women had in common was the fight for shorter hours; shorter weeks; and shorter years.
K. Weeks like David Graeber wonder why should the upper classes be allowed to seek work with meaning while the rest of the schlubs must clean up after them? Why is the main reason poor kids go into the military that they are seeking a life with meaning? “…liberation of labor must the the liberation from labor.” (Antonio Negri “The Labor of Job: The Biblical Text as a Parable of Human Labor”.)
I will be forever grateful to John Edwards for reminding me that we have our priorities all screwed up. When I heard him say in a speech in 2003 that it was time to reward “work over wealth”, I began a journey that continues to make me question everything I believed to be true.
There are realistic ways to reward work. Weeks is an advocate of the basic income as was Thomas Paine over 200 years ago. And what work needs to be done should always involve shorter hours.
I grimace every time I hear some liberal, or more accurately, some Democrat advocate for more pre-school education. Yes, let’s put the poor little ones into cubicles as soon as possible. Instead, if the subject comes up in conversation, I usually say, “But we wouldn’t need pre-school if the parents were around. Parents should have short work days so that the kids can learn about life from them. I learned a lot by following my father around as he built things. He would tell stories of ancient times that he had read in books as he asked me to hold the nails while he built a small barn. Granted he was an educator; a pioneer in special education at a time when the handicapped were kept at home under wraps. But he often said that “children should not be mass produced, but custom made.” He taught the kids to bale hay and take care of animals and build things like a boat and a car out of plywood and a small motor. Yes, he got a lot of the janitorial tasks done by kids instead of himself. But he was always there and did all the heavy lifting himself. So I know how to wash and wax a car and comb and brush a horse. I know about the seasons from the small crops on the school grounds and by picking leaves and identifying them in a folder. We looked for arrowheads on Sunday afternoons. Well, you get the picture.
Why were aristocrats allowed to be lazy and not their servants? In fact, the less an aristocrat did the more he was admired. Today we admire Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian and look with envy at their leisure time. Why not more leisure for everybody?
Time to change the conversation.
Ian Welsh
Yes. I hate the idea of pre-Kindergarten. Let’s stick em in the factory even earlier and stamp all the spark and love of learning out of them.
Tom W Harris
Back in 1975 at my local technical college, I was fortunate enough to snag a part-time COBOL internship. My colleagues and I noticed that several managers above the department level had little to do but sit around in their offices. Periodically they would emerge to engage some unlucky soul in dumb conversation. One of my co-workers summed it up admirably: “The more they make, the less they do.”
A couple years later while reading the Sunday paper job ads, I ran across this job title: Manager of Management Development. A sign of very bad things to come.
Hugh
Powerful writing. I try to insert the issue of criminality in all this. Our elites justify their increasingly hereditary wealth and privileges on the basis that they know more and better than we do. So the one argument they can’t use with any legitimacy is that they didn’t know what the rest of us see and experience every day. Of course, they do so all the time. They ignore, deny, or say “who could have known?” If forced, they will fall back on “mistakes were made.” They will use the passive voice. They will avoid any agency. The next step up is to say that yes, mistakes (generically) were made, but they were made in good faith. If all else fails, they say they are taking full and complete responsibility for X as a way of taking no responsibility for X.
Our elites also rig the processes they control to give an official stamp of non-accountability for their acts. If you are high up enough, you can name a commission, stack it, underfund it, and limit its scope. Problem not so much solved as minimized and deferred. I am not a conspiracy theorist, but I found the various 9/11 reports culminating in the 9/11 Commission and its report a fascinating case study of this kind of manipulation. But it goes down to the prosecutor who works with cops and depends upon their cooperation bending the system so that a cop who murders some unarmed unfortunate either won’t get indicted or, even less likely, convicted for it. Glenn Greenwald refers to this as our two-tiered justice system, but it would be more accurate to leave it at that we have a two tier or two class system made up of the elites and the rest of us.
To return to the issue of crime, our elites by virtue of the superior knowledge they claim can not say they don’t know they are looting us. They are knowing criminals. It doesn’t matter to me what they choose to ignore or how they delude themselves with regard to their crimes. What they believe, or say they believe, is irrelevant. It is all bad faith. It is all crime. The example I use is that of the SS officer involved in mass executions. It doesn’t matter to me what his beliefs and justifications are. What matters to me is what he should have known, not at the exulted level of one of the elite, but at that of any ordinary person, at the level of those he was slaughtering. It is the same for our political elites, our Obamas and Ted Cruzs, our financial elites, our Dimons and Blankfeins, our rich, the Waltons and Gates, and all those in the media, academia, the justice system, and the bureaucracy who defend and enable them.
Karen
Ian, This is very powerful. Thank you .Sometimes I am so broken , I forget the truth of who I am no matter how poor and broken at this point. I have been on both spectrums of finance. Often times during these hardships I suddenly realize the great life lesson I am learning and enduring. I have always been a very compassionate person and never judged others less fortunate than I, by there life style due to poverty nor dress or education. God graced me for many years somehow being in the right place at the right time. I am not educated . I just really liked people and had some kind of gift. I guess you could say that I was just lucky or very blessed. Really can not express myself very well. It is good to know that I am not alone in my thinking and what I see and know to be truth. I have learned that people really do not like the truth and they are so fearful when they see what can happen to people so easily on just a fluke. your whole life can change in minutes. keep writing. This is the first good read in so long. You made me remember what I already knew. Best regards
McNair
Why were you poor in your 20s? you could work on your own at that point
Ian Welsh
And, for a time, I did, and worked hard. There are many poor people who work hard.
Then, when I was 25, I became severely ill, a story I have told elsewhere.