AM I MIDDLE-CLASS, I WONDERED.

WRESTLING WITH THE MIDDLE CLASS

This is personal, though it's also theoretical.  I've wrestled with the idea of the "middle class" since I was about  ten or twelve, just before becoming adolescent in the Fifties, and addressed my mother while she was ironing -- which middle class women always did and the only time I could talk to her.  It made her angry.  "You know I can't get away from you now, don't you?"  She didn't like to be pinned because she didn't know the answers to my relentless and often impossible questions.

"Are we middle-class?"  She didn't know.  "I suppose so," she said.  Earlier I had asked, "What is our annual income?"  She didn't know that either and didn't want to say anyhow, because it was beginning to be obvious that my father wasn't providing enough and she was having to hide her little augmentations to save his ego.  She had married him thinking he was an urban man with good prospects.

I was very pleased with Paul Fussell's book entitled "Class" because it told me I was Class X, a concept from the Sixties, meaning highly educated but poor.  Both those aspects are rather more dramatic than in my life, but excused me from the betrayal of my parents' faith that being college-educated guaranteed membership in the middle class, which they believed was a necessity for survival.  For them it was part of making the transition from being farm kids to being salary earners in a time when there were lots of jobs and people could rise through them.

But also, for me, reading my grandmothers' books from the turn from the 19th to the 20th century, there was a moral component to the issue.  What right did I have to get richer and more important than anyone else?  This was a part of the Progressive political movement that we only addressed indirectly.  I mean, my mother defended the rights of Black people but we didn't know any.  My father still said "pickaninnie" and "papoose" with total innocence of the implications.  He just thought they were cute words and he never found out anything different.

In old age when my father had been gone for decades and she had found her metier in elementary school with a protective principal, my mother went on a teachers' tour to Asia, which she had always romanticized.  She had a blast. She also had a genetic Japanese doctor, very trusted, who took her through to the end of her life.  She didn't go to Africa, but Africa came to her, moving into the Albina neighborhood and bringing gangs with them. Next door was a respectable, hard-working Black couple with a daughter my mother sheltered after school until they got home from work.  When the parents died of old age, the daughter got into drugs. Her own daughter was psychotic and dangerous.

When my mother neared death, two ambulance companies were rivals for business and got into a fracas over who would take my mother to the hospital.  They were Black.  She was sick enough that she didn't understand and thought they had come to rob the house.  My brother coped.

My life context was greatly varied.  Attending prestigious colleges did not mean that I got to know the Upper Class.  Nor did the very wealthy attend church or visit governmental offices.  Occasionally they would buy Western art, so I knew a very rich people.  Living on the rez meant that I knew the lower class, the welfare and substance-abuse penniless class.  I mean, they were friends.  And when I was wearing old clothes, I was treated like them even though I'm the least "Indian-looking" person in town.

It's been a long time to bring to consciousness which of my values were middle class and which required money.  Learned in childhood, they come even when unwelcome.  This self-righteous class of people is partly informed by rural and small town values from the 19th century (one can't say "last century" anymore) and partly reflects fragile prosperity.  If one had money, education was the first requirement, though the subject was unspecified.  (My father's master's thesis was about the price of potatoes.)  Second were family, home, and automobile -- a complex.  The modern addition to that list is computer, as a commercial basic rather than a games console..  

Then came the cultural elements: radio, playing an instrument, concerts, photography, books (Book of the Month) and magazines, travel to national sites like Grand Canyon and Mount Rushmore, tour ships.  Movies were big, esp musicals, but theatre not so much.  Science entered after WWII when so many advances were made and we went to outer space.  In my first college physics class (1957) we sat listening to the beeps from Sputnik.  Science in its technology aspect quickly became dominant.

Noncompliance was of two kinds.  If it was due to poor self-control or even madness, it was denied, hidden, and pushed away.  If it were due to eccentricity, being an artist or adventurer, every effort was made to bring one back into line.  The point of an individual was to serve the whole, not to go out there being famous unless it brought in prosperity and was honorable.  If a person were going to be Picasso or even Rockwell, that person had better be damned good at it.  But on the whole, most middle class people didn't have a very clear idea of how to judge anything except by money, titles, degrees and awards.  They have been taught to stay within the guidelines, particularly when it comes to religion, so that their rebellion against Christianity is always in terms of Christianity.  Any real new worldview, even buttressed with science, is to them simply not religion.  

We are a people now who are just beginning to know what we don't know, ways of thinking other than what we know.  We still don't know how to react to that.  The idea of classes being in status layers according to income and education is a product of capital as central.  It's only a concept, a way of understanding stability and safety, because those in the "middle" seem to have those.  But that's an illusion.  Any individual is vulnerable to disease, accidents, snarl-ups of employment, crime.  And now, of course, we are ALL subject to climate change without knowing what it will do exactly.

Today the bottom economy is doing a little better world-wide, but the top refuses to realize how endangered they are, how rage is building.  The middle class is still into compliance but seems to be confused about compliance -- to what?  It's a scary time.  My education tells me to keep thinking.  There WILL be a solution.  Some day.