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- Excerpt from The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck; Note that Wang, despite being a dirt-poor farmer, had his standards too. Prince William certainly had his. We now delve into the second half of the book. But before that, an example of a definite lack of class:
- Mediacorp Marketing, as seen on mrbrown.com Comedians have been fired for quipping about the disaster a little too soon, and that doesn't quite approach the level of naked profiteering on show here. Putting aside other concerns ("wrecked" havoc?), were Mediacorp really so hard up for advertising revenue? They could have kept to oblique references, such as reporting that it's a good time to buy (fundamentally-strong) stocks that are now underpriced due to panic selling (which, sadly, is probably true) Inside A Man's Castle Dear Hopefuls: It does, but the garage shows: go for the garage. And don't say home - it's vulgar. Many rules-of-thumb for class can be condensed, and one of those regards organic versus synthetic material, already covered in the case of clothing; again, for furniture, organic is far classier, though there are further distinctions - a plywood table from IKEA doesn't quite have the same heft as one of a darker wood (earlier, Fussell put out the hierarchy as: oak at the bottom, then walnut, mahogany, and finally teak at the peak. Plywood doesn't even deign a mention) On to television, Fussell notes that a fair guesstimate of a household's class can be swiftly made by noting the treatment of their TV, or lack thereof - the more proudly it is displayed, the lower the class, and many upper-class families don't even have one (as is the case for Singapore's First Family) For those so unrefined as to have a TV, what it is used for further cements their status - the upper-middle class watches little, and when they do, goes for news and educational programmes. The middle class likes dramas and sport, with game shows below that. The working class doesn't mind anything really, and the unfortunates are often thrilled just to have access, though the content is often controlled by staff at whatever institution they are housed in. And His Best Friends Pets say something about their owners, and in this respect I defer to Mr. Ham and the Robos, who all agree that the Hamster's Guide To Good Guardianship guarantees that association with a well-fed hamster or three is an unquestionable mark of discerning taste and style in a human. If you are able to keep this hamster simulation happy, Mr. Ham is accepting applications for internships Of the less-enlightened who favour other animals, dogs which may be used for sport hunting or other recreation are the classiest (e.g. Labradors, golden retrievers, corgis, etc), and it is essential that they not actually have to work, like their owners. Those that may be called upon to do so, such as in guarding the house, are naturally of a lower class. Fussell quotes Rousseau for cats: "...They (the upper class) do not like cats because the cat is free, and will never consent to become a slave. He will do nothing to your order, as the other animals do...", though as for dogs, exotic cats are classier than alley breeds, and are owned accordingly. Caged birds are supposedly middle-class, and aquariums high-prole, with an excess of ornamentation reducing the class further. And as for bunnies, everybody likes them, or at least I would like to think so. Of Wine And Water Alcoholic beverages are a subject in which I have practically no expertise, so I cannot comment much, other than repeating Fussell's guidelines verbatim. It bears repeating again that expense does not always correlate with class - Roald Dahl detailed how a a nouveau riche millionaire gets one put over him by his butler when he pretends to be able to appreciate wine (though in another story, he hints at how wine experts aren't that discriminating - and neither are those who go for water, by the way). Pabst Blue Ribbon going for US$44 a pop in China is the final nail in this particular coffin, and shows what a bit of clever rebranding can do in a new market. The general rule here is that dry is classy, and sweet is not. Sidenote: Academics in the hard sciences may fall back on lab ethanol in times of dire need, and apparently some Russians are drinking extra vodka to protect against radiation damage (as if they needed an excuse...) On eating times, late ones were associated with classiness, but this is likely not much of a signal nowdays with many office warriors not getting off until well over six pm. Innovation with food is generally the province of the upper-middle class, with the middle-class often selecting a restaurant more for its professed elegance, rather than the food. And Balls In All Sizes  Balls by class In recreation and sport, the more physical, popular and accessible the activity is, the lower the class. It may however come as some consolation to workers everywhere that additionally, the higher the class, the smaller the balls. Somewhat counterintuitively, Fussell states that bowling is a classic prole sport, reasoning that bowlers can 1) drink and smoke while bowling, 2) don't have to keep in shape and 3) often turn out in company T-shirts. I would say that this does not wholly apply here, not the least because it can be a decently expensive sport. [N.B. I also remembered coming across a survey that touted bowlers as among the most intelligent of sportspeople as a group (a claim repeated here, for one), and after searching for the source, found it - in the Weekly World News, which can be safely said not to be among the most reputable of publications (and which Fussell has something to say about later on)] Fussell's hierarchy goes as follows: Yachting, golf, cricket, polo and tennis are at the top, then baseball and (American) football, ice-hockey, boxing, stock-car racing, bowling and Roller Derby, in that order. Among those not mentioned, I would guess that rugby stands relatively high, due to its association with English public schools. Although similarly racquet sports with small balls/shuttlecocks, badminton and table-tennis are perhaps slightly lower in class, if prize money is any indication - a Grand Slam winner takes home in the region of a couple of million dollars, while a badminton Grand Prix Gold event offers maybe US$120000 onwards - in total. If we take this line of thinking to its logical conclusion, innocent kids playing marbles could be the classiest of them all - which makes sense, in a way. But, like, why should you give a shit anyway Being Learned Dear Worried: It is very wrong, but at least it indicates that he's learning something down there. He may go far. Speaking of car decals (remember, no Mercs if you can help it) and bumper stickers, one amusing observation I made, when walking through NUS carparks, is that there are rather more of those professing affiliation with other universities, than NUS itself. This effect extends to casual wear. Perhaps this will change after enough people have it drummed into them long enough that NUS is legitimately within the top thirty universities globally - hey, Harvard was an upstart once... Fussell (who, remember, is a professor himself) suggests that this veneration (and flaunting) of education is particularly strong in the United States, because they have no other tradition of honours, as in most monarchies. Unfortunately, this has perhaps also made the USA more vulnerable to the mushrooming of institutions of uncertain quality, as revealed from this quote from the 1870s: "There are two universities in England, four in France, ten in Prussia, and 37 in Ohio." He particularly laments the to-him unwarranted promotion of schools to colleges and then universities, a subject previously covered at length here, and notes (a couple of decades before it became widespread) that college often ends up as a swindle. What too often happens is that the middle and working class get it in their heads that a college education is the only route to a bright future, and sacrifice heavily (many times going deep into debt) to fund a few years at a college (at least in name), only to find that "he's not respected at all because his college has no clout", and that he doesn't even get any income advantage because he graduated from a nonselective college (i.e. one which basically anyone who can afford the fees can enter). [N.B. This has recently been realised in China, where education has always been held in high esteem - over a thousand college grads applied for eight jobs collecting "night soil" in Zhejiang. Unavoidable, really, with the number of grads increasing by 30% each year. Is that why they're now including bikini posedowns as part of their admission exams?] There is a fine line between maintaining standards and mere snobbery here, I guess. On one hand, it may not seem fair that new but demanding institutions do not get all the recognition they deserve, but at least this is usually rectified by time (e.g. the Indian Institutes of Technology). On the other hand, it's also not very fair that some universities require far less expertise and effort than more established ones, but award a title that is in theory equivalent. Either way, with degrees not as certain a signal of class or competence as before, branching out is happening at both ends of the college experience - at one end, people are resorting to spending yet more years pursuing advanced degrees, and at the other, trying to get their children into exclusive preparatory/high schools. And what do the classes read? The upper class tends not to read a lot of books, contrary to popular expectation, instead perusing magazines such as Time and Newsweek (so my high school knew what it was doing...), Fortune, Forbes, Business Week, etc, and they don't care what you think of that. The working class prefers Reader's Digest, TV Guide (Singapore equivalent: 8 Days?), and saucy tabloids such as the abovementioned Weekly World News (which should roughly correspond to The New Paper, a copy which I regularly tote around, to occasional mild disapproval). They're at least not usually pretentious either, and Fussell notes that "pretense, fraud and misrepresentation" only really comes into its own among the middle class, though he may have gone a little too far in dismissing Pearl S. Buck as a producer of "unreadable second-rate pretentious books". From The Mouths of Babes We are nearing the end of the book, with speech being mentioned as one of the hardest things to fix (unless you're a king, maybe). Accents aside, Fussell concentrates on the telling choice of words, with the middle class especially given over to euphemism and faux-eloquence:
And you get the idea. Talking too much and at that, loudly (and deliberately) is a prole sign, while the middle class, who are more socially conscious, try to impress with vocabulary. Upper-class people often don't talk at all, with Fussell noting that "ummmmm" is frequently a complete sentence among them. Final thoughts to come... Bonus Song of the Week: Next: An End To Class
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