What you can learn about social class from watching too much TV -- The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, The OC, The West Wing, Mad Men, The Affair. Check it out: nytimes.com/2020/10/10/opi…
I wrote about the positive portrayal of the character Ainsley Hayes in The West Wing TV series. Several Republicans have told me they like this character because it is an unusual pop culture depiction of a Republican who is as witty and smart as her Democrat colleagues
It's interesting how seeing a positive portrayal of a character with traits that don't usually go together can influence us (e.g. conservative + witty/smart)
For me it was characters like Kal Penn in Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle. Showed it's possible to be cool + smart. I was sort of uncomfortable w/my own curiosity as a kid bc I'd absorbed the message that if you were smart you were a nerd & therefore it wasn't ok to be smart
I also wrote about how social class is portrayed in other TV shows, including The Sopranos & The Wire. But had to edit to get the essay under 3000 words nytimes.com/2020/10/10/opi…
I'll share the uncut version (5000+ words) in my newsletter. Sign up here: eepurl.com/gNOyq5
"It's actually much deeper and more insidious than this. These kinds of shows and movies that you grew up watching provide the character and narrative archetypes that you act out in your own life."
As a kid, I moved from LA to Red Bluff (pop: 14K). This town had a lot of drugs, crime, shootings, etc. but I remember adults generally thought it was safe simply because it was small and rural
It's the 4th most dangerous city in California
“Looking at violent crime specifically, Red Bluff has a violent crime rate that is 151% higher than the California average and 195% higher than the national average...one of the most dangerous regions in the United States" redbluffdailynews.com/2019/05/31/tak…
It's a very poor town (around 40% of kids live below the poverty line)
Kids would get shot and adults would say at least it's not like it is in big cities but Red Bluff is more dangerous than every city in LA
"the ugly fact that most middle-class Socialists, while theoretically pining for a classless society, cling like glue to their miserable fragments of social prestige."
Reflections on the diet and appearance of the working class
"If the English physique has declined, this is no doubt partly due to the fact that the Great War carefully selected the million best men in England and slaughtered them"
Steven Pinker has called this the "euphemism treadmill"
A status game, related to luxury beliefs. Educated class creates new terms as tools to identify who is "in the know." Facilitates coordination of team members, helps with identifying outsiders and adversaries
In a biblical story, the Gileadites were at war with the Ephraimites. To identify their Ephraimite enemies, the Gileadites told those they captured to say the word “shibboleth.” Ephraimites could not say the “sh” part of the word. To the Gileadites, it sounded like “sibboleth.”
A shibboleth functions as a linguistic password. If you are a member of a social class or political group and you are trying to determine whether someone you’re speaking with is part of your group, you can give them the test. Can they pronounce the “sh?"
"Status-Income Disequilibrium (SID). The sufferers of this malady have jobs that give them high status but low income...sufferers include journalists, editors, TV producers, White House aides, military brass, politicians who aren't independently wealthy" weeklystandard.com/david-brooks/t…
"On one end is the Monied Class, those with plenty of dough who can use it to acquire status...I am more concerned with the Titled Class...Senior Fellow, Editor in Chief, Assistant to the Secretary. Or titles that include an employer's name--the New York Times, the White House"
"The Titled Class has always resented and secretly envied the Monied Class...the rich used to be remote. An investment banker went to Andover and Princeton...But in the new media age, the radio producer also went to Andover and Princeton" Fun, interesting from @nytdavidbrooks
Trust vs. Mistrust is Stage 1 of Erik Erikson's 8 stages of psychosocial development
-If child develops trust with parents, they go on to believe that the world is basically trustworthy
-If child is mistreated, they go on to become suspicious/mistrustful of others later in life
"Millennials are also more likely than older generations to report that they have no acquaintances (25% of Millennials say this is the case), no friends (22%), no close friends (27%), and no best friends (30%)."
In Germany in the 1920s, "the Communists cooperated with the Nazis in attacking the Social Democratic Party and both sought to destroy the liberal democracy of the Weimar Republic." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifa_(G…
Communists and Nazis allied against their common enemy, the center-left Social Democratic Party. Communists planned to to take out the Nazis after toppling the Weimar Govt. Then Hitler rose to power, and the Nazis sent Communist Party members to camps en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist…
Joseph Goebbels in 1926 published an open letter to a Communist leader assuring him that Nazism and Communism were really the same thing. “You and I,” Goebbels declared, “are fighting one another, but we are not really enemies.” amzn.to/3hdOtJ3