Chapter 6 Chapter 5 Consumption, Entertainment, Decoration (1)

【drink wine There is hardly a single occasion that shows one's social status more fully than "cocktail hour", because no matter what or how much you drink, it can hint at a person's social status.For example, if you are a middle-aged person and order a glass of white wine (by the way, the sweeter the white wine served at the reception, the lower the social status of the host), then in the meantime, you have issued a special Hint: You are a person from the upper or upper-middle class society.That's like saying that, as a college habit (a good one, of course), you drank mostly expensive hard liquor and bordered on binge drinking in smart excess.Now, middle-aged people are sophisticated enough to want to change their tastes and drink lighter wines. (Dry white wine is considered a low-calorie beverage and is therefore favored by those who are extremely body-conscious).Now that many status-conscious people have given up the habit of drinking hard liquor in favor of white wine, there has emerged a growing group of upper- and upper-middle-class people who drink white wine and are willing to drink it in public. Delicate things with a low degree of taste, don't want your stumbling gait and slurred speech to be seen or heard.

One of their favorite white wines is Italian Soave, which is a relatively common and well-known imported wine of high quality and relatively cheap.There is also a popular wine called Frascati.Furthermore, asking for a Perrier soda (upper class) or a Club soda (middle class) while others are swigging hard liquor sends the same message as asking for a glass of white wine.What this move means is that I am classy and popular for two reasons: first, that I used to drink too much which was funny, risky and imprudent; Quit drinking, which shows that I am both intelligent and self-disciplined.Besides, since I'm sober at the moment, I must be socially superior to you, because I'll see you drunk and tell you how miserable you look when you're drunk.

In addition to white wine and carbonated water, the drinks of the upper class include vodka (especially the vodka that only seeps, if you add tonic water, you can only be regarded as the middle class), Bloody Mary (remember: never drink it at three in the afternoon. Drink it later), Scotch whiskey (especially on the rocks or with a little water).There is no particular way to drink soda water into Scotch whiskey.Adherents of English heritage would consider Scotch whiskey superior to bourbon, the typical drink of the middle class.Most of the middle class are also lovers of martinis, and they think they are smart to call martinis "martooni".If you drink a martini after dinner, you must be a poor person. Beer belongs to the monopoly of college students. A college student with good insight in drinking can judge accurately by observing the brand of alcohol everyone drinks. Find out which grade the school belongs to.For example, it depends on whether you drink Molson's, Beck's, Heineken's (commonly known as green beer) or Grolsch, or Budweiser, Michelob, Strohs, Piel's, or Schlitz.Dwight Macdonald captures an episode of John O'Hara's revelation by observing this distinction: that students at Yale get drunk in a completely different way than students at Penn State. (Another way to identify it is that if there is no difference in other aspects, glass beer bottles are much more advanced than cans-this is still a manifestation of the principle of advocating ancient times.)

The bourgeoisie have a penchant for hiding wine in the kitchen, where they drink it slowly and secretly.If the bottle is in the open, it must be from a brand such as Old Grand Dad or Tanqueray (a valid Anglican mark).The real upper class doesn't have to drink decent brands, and they're not in the slightest shy about serving cheap local wines to their guests.They also often drink from disposable glasses because they care about the wine in the container rather than the container itself.On the other hand, upper-middle-class people drink from outdated oversized cups with colorful pictures of ducks, hounds or boats.The middle class likes to drink from a glass with a pink stripe on it.The upper proles drank in juice cups, which you could buy at hardware stores or thrift stores, mostly decorated with images of oranges, strawberries, piglets, or girls in sun hats.The glass bottles of jelly or peanut butter, whose trademarks have been soaked by water, are the drinking utensils used by the poor in the middle and lower classes.

In fact, it is not difficult at all to distinguish different social classes through beverages. There is a clear dividing line that clearly divides the upper and lower classes of society, and that is the sweetness of beverages: relatively sweet or sweet.If you hear a name called Seven and Seven and it sounds strange, if you wrinkle your nose at the thought of a Seagrams Seven Grown (a cheap gin. A translator's note) and Seven Up, you're basically an upper class People are either close to the upper class, or at least don't mostly compromise with the heavy sugary diets at the bottom of society.Bourbon and ginger ale is quite popular with the lower classes and almost completely unknown to the upper class.Some cocktails like daiquiris, stinger mists, brandy Alexanderre and sweet manhattans are often drunk before dinner, which shows that people don't know much about the basic principles of aperitif. (The function of the aperitif is to appetize, so you should drink drier wine to promote the increase of gastric juice. -Translator's Note) Only some people who are not poor and often travel in Europe can master the aperitif. in principle.

The consumption of sweets by the American underclass is astonishing.According to the Lapoor Consumer Survey, 40 percent of Americans (of course, most of them are poor) drink at least one can of Coca-Cola or similar beverages every day.Poor people in America hardly touch bread unless it has sugar or honey added to it.It's even worse in the Midwest, where brandy often outsells whiskey in bars and barely sells wine, and in fact you can draw a reliable social hierarchy by how much sugar each family consumes The dividing line, of course, can be excluded by children, because young people, no matter what class they come from, like to drink sweeter wine.This flavor certainly shows the progression from soda-drinking kid to grown-up man drinking.The girlfriend of former children's TV star Trent Lyman who hanged himself gave us a good proof, saying: "He started drinking Seagram's with 7-up. One day he passed out in the whirlpool, fully dressed and drunk. "

[meal So when we see a TV commercial boasting of a biscuit called "A Drop of Honey," we know that its audience is undoubtedly the lower classes or children of all classes.We know that the research on the relationship between eating and drinking and social class is not enough.Among them is Diane Johnson, a trusted expert who recently reviewed twenty-four cookbooks and several books on food in The New York Review of Books.These books were aimed at the upper middle class, and Diane Johnson found that they all emphasized "elegant" style.When you host a dinner party for friends, from the moment they sit at the table, they are no longer friends or some equal to you.They have become the audience. At this time, your duty is to leave a very good impression on everyone with the magnificent table layout and rich dishes, so as to reflect your sense of superiority.From the profusion of "elegant" pursuits, Diane Johnson concluded that "the social class differences in American life ... seem to be deepening." Not only that, but anxiety due to class is also rising sharply. "Eating and drinking in themselves are not the problem here," Diane Johnson writes in her book, "but these glitzy and excessively expensive things indicate anxiety," worrying that the host's status will be compromised by careless table setting and food. Arrangements are underestimated.Therefore, there will be a large number of candles on the table, flowers, noble napkins and tablecloths, silver candlesticks and pretzels, and even small silver dishes for salt, with small silver spoons on the side.Of course, there will also be more and more cumbersome and luxurious table wine utensils, such as the basket holding the table wine bottle, even if it contains a bottle of wine bought in a local hotel that has passed a hundred years, it will not make people feel nostalgic; There are also silver spouts that fit over the neck of the bottle to ensure that not a single drop of the precious liquid is lost; there are silver-plated cork openers; there are silver bottle bases; and even silver table wine glasses Pads, and so on.

Things like this are usually arranged around eight o'clock in the evening.Starting to eat at this time is an unmistakable and reliable sign of high class.Also, are there items on the table such as tomato sauce bottles and ashtrays, especially ones shaped like toilet bowls, that seem to invite diners to "put your butts (cigarette butts) here." (English The word "butts" in the word "butts" also has the meaning of butt, and the author uses a pun here. -Translator's Note) The destitute and invisible bottom living in shelters usually have dinner at 5:30 in the evening, because the poor class who take care of them Workers need to pack up early so they can go roller skating or bowling in the evening.Thus, most of the poor have dinner at six or half past six in the evening.Families like the TV show "Jack and Sophia" are middle-class because Jack is an insurance salesman, but upper-prole because they eat dinner at six o'clock.Furthermore, the poor class should not only look at when they eat dinner, but also how long it takes them to eat.They could easily finish a meal in eight minutes, starting with the sleeves in a can and ending with instant coffee loaded with sugar.Because poor families never talk, comment, appreciate and praise the food when they eat, it is surprisingly fast.For them, meals are simply about nourishment, although their dinners are extended a bit when "good old paper napkins" are pulled out on major holidays like Christmas, Easter or Rosh Hashanah.The lower your social class, the more often you eat with relatives during the year.More often than not, they do so out of poverty, but out of fear: fear that they'll be rude because they're ill-bred.Unless one's social status is secure, one prefers to stay with what sociologists call a "kin network."

"Candlelight" dinners and other nostalgic designs for passing time at the table are middle class or higher anyway, if you're eating in broad daylight candlelight is useless anyway, middle class in general Eat dinner at 7 or even as late as 7:30, middle and upper class people have dinner at 8:00 or 8:30, and some upper middle class people, as well as the upper and invisible top floors, will have dinner at 9 o'clock or later, The cocktail party alone lasted at least two hours, and sometimes they even forgot dinner altogether.However, the more decent and considerate upper-class people usually have dinner around eight o'clock, because they can't bear to let the servants get off work too late. If they don't send the cleaners home until 3:00 in the morning, you can be sure they're upstarts.

【food Usually the people at the top of society do not eat very well, what they eat is as monotonous, dull, and uninspiring as their conversation, Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney in his "with a hundred The book "A Year of Millionaires Living Together" records those unforgettable meals. It sounds like this: crab meat fillet, chicken ham pie, lettuce leaf salad, and finally a huge ice cream cake.And this rich man, who can eat almost anything imaginable in the world, from elephant steak to rose juice and sprinkles of gold flakes, carefully records this dinner: "What a meal Good supper, fried chicken with green peas, salad, and freshly baked cake." And his breakfast: "Orange juice, half a slaw, porridge, eggs, bacon, and coffee." (These are Western The most common breakfast food. A translator's note)

Exoticism, as the name implies, is a style that originated from outside the territory, and it began to appear frequently when we looked at the middle and upper classes.This ethos is epitomized by the middle-class out-of-state girl new to the big city, whose manual for life is The New Yorker.Author Roger Price describes their culinary adventures: After living in this city (referring to New York. - Translator's Note) for a few months, in order to save money and feel bored on the one hand, she began to study the knowledge of food and wanted to create an exotic special dish, so that her The small kitchen is almost overwhelmed, such as: paella, a kind of authentic curry rice, as well as Lauren scones, Yorkshire pudding and roast beef.When a man comes, she will show them a special dish, accompanied by candlelight and wine brought by her lover.After several unwilling failures, she finally ditched the "special" and went back to spaghetti, topped with a sauce she made with hamburger beef and canned tomatoes, and sprinkled with an overabundance of oatmeal. Ligano cheese powder. There is a common perception among the upper middle class that sliced ​​and packaged bread is something to be frowned upon, although some may be forgiven for having quaint names such as "Arnold's Brick Oven" or "Pepper Ridge Farm" Sign of bread. "Bolai" is a very magical word here (Arnold and Pepper Ridge are both British place names. -Translator's Note), sometimes many things will be favored as long as they are imported products instead of domestic products.So foie gras, non-skimmed cheese, wine, morels, and pasta are in fashion.But not all foreign food is popular, such as Mexican taco and Italian pizza, as well as mediocre Chinese food.Now Japanese food is coming in, and Chinese food is going downhill with the exception of Sichuan, not to mention Mexican food - considered hopelessly cheesy, as are under-alcohol wine and beer. On the other hand, as we move into the world of the middle class and the poor, what we drink with our meals becomes soft drinks like Coke: 1 Coke or ginger ale, black raspberry juice or sweet juice, nothing else The favorite of the poor: beer, of course, in cans. The middle-class fear of ideology that we mentioned earlier when discussing room performances, they also have a corresponding fear in terms of food: strong and spicy food, what this class likes is bland and must be cooked very soft and bad.The mention of garlic at a bourgeois dinner table would certainly confuse the host.Even onions are used sparingly.However, canned fruit is more popular than fresh fruit for two reasons: one is that canned fruit is sweeter, and the other is that it is blander.Food purveyors have learned not by imagination but by experience that simply making any flavor of food mild can increase sales, whereas using words like "spicy" and "strong" can be risky. A notch or two down, "spicy" is back, and ethnic foods are starting to pop up, too, with things like Polish salami and spicy kimchi.This is precisely the reason why the middle class avoids such tastes, which they firmly believe are associated with the lower classes, non-Anglo-Saxon foreigners, new immigrants, etc., most of whom can learn from their unequivocal tastes. to identify the non-upper class dietary tastes.Soon there will be a whole generation of people, born into middle-class families and basically raised on refrigerator food, who will think of "fish" as a white squishy thing (in US supermarkets, fish is usually sorted in one piece A piece of white meat with no thorns or skin is sold. A translator's note), like bread. [sweets Ice cream, sweet and soft at once, has become a favorite food of the middle class, and a certain kind of ice cream you like must contain a sense of class.Vanilla ice cream is favored by the top, chocolate ice cream is generally lower than vanilla, and strawberry and other fruit flavored ice cream is closer to the bottom.If you want to dig into New York City Mayor Edward Corker's class background, look no further than his favorite ice cream: chocolate and buttered almonds.When Arthur Penn, the director of the movie Bonnie and Clyde, wanted to portray a gang of paupers, he only needed one detail in which they went out to buy peach ice cream.Speaking of which, you can imagine how many embarrassing level dilemmas "Kaffy" ice cream cake will bring. (Caffey's ice cream shop mostly sells fruit-flavored ice cream, which is implied by the author to be low-level. A translator's note) 【Shopping place If ice cream is a vivid indicator of rank, of course where to buy ice cream and other foods can also tell.Of course, there are exceptions, such as the suburbs where I live, where it is almost impossible to see obvious class signals, upper-class and some upper-middle-class families order by phone, and then have it delivered to the door by polite men with friendly greetings on their lips, And put the goods directly into the refrigerator in the kitchen.Ten years ago, there were six such delivery stores in the area; today there is only one (see Chapter 8, "Trends in Proverbs").The lower middle class and the middle class go to the supermarket to buy things home by themselves. The supermarket they often go to is A&P, while the poor usually go to Acme or Food Fair to buy food because things are slightly cheaper. The meat was a notch lower, and more importantly, there were no exotic imports, or anything scary foreign, on the shelves.There is also a reason why the upper echelons prefer to ask for goods over the phone, they like to boss around and they are happy to show off by correctly naming imported foods, such as certain unusual cheeses. 【eating out Now it's time for us to examine the situation of going out to "go to a restaurant".Eating out is the preserve of the middle and poorer classes, who take advantage of the opportunity to play a game of "be king or queen for a day" and experience being served for a while by ordering food and serving by waiters.By frequenting restaurants that purport to serve authentic gourmet dishes, the middle class is most keen to pretend to be those of a higher social class than itself, such as trying to make themselves seen as upper middle class people with finer and more sophisticated tastes. It's a lot of fun playing games like this.In restaurants aimed at capturing a middle-class clientele, there were often candles and fires, accompanied by plenty of music played by organs and stringed instruments.A woman with only a high school degree and a job as an administrative secretary told Starz Tucker: "I used to have dinner with business people, and I really liked it. I liked the background music in those restaurants. It was relaxing and kind of It’s cozy and doesn’t interrupt your conversation at all. I love the atmosphere and the people who create it, and they’re the same people you’re around.” The middle class lives in this little walnut shell, and I say that because the middle class doesn't go to restaurants for the food at all, they go there for the pretend "art" or the orchestra and not for the food. The craftsmanship of a chef.There is a restaurant near where I live that just wants to show its excessive pride through the decoration of the restaurant nakedly, without trying to improve its culinary skills.Every dining room in it pretends to be various historic styles, Colonial, Victorian, with obvious fakes.It is all front, and every place in the house hopes to arouse your attention to detail, like a rug.wallpaper and furniture.One of the rooms was decorated in a "jungle" style, with trees and exotic flowers, and a waterfall was built.The rushing water rushes into a mossy pond.“Looks like a Tarzan movie set, with tropical vines hanging everywhere,” one critic remarked. In a place like this, the food is sure to be bland and crappy, runny and limp, bland, It will also be ridiculously expensive.The dishes that arrive must have been pre-cooked half-finished products, then processed in the microwave by a team of thermal engineers, not chefs.Because the middle class believes that going out to eat must go to "high-end" restaurants, so this concept is used prominently in advertising slogans in order to attract middle-class customers. Elegance Par Excellence The dignified New Monref's brings fine dining to the city of Indianapolis.Classic French cuisine, up to international standards.Impeccable service.Silk shimmering.Dining environment composed of crystal and silverware.Experienced culinary staff hail from excellent restaurants in Europe, New York, Chicago and Cincinnati.All this language, except for the way the last sentence is phrased which betrays prose depravity, is designed to appeal to a middle-class predilection for the "high", such as the so-called "royal" sensibility. The "Monreve" restaurant is undoubtedly a sham place, and you certainly can't pour yourself a drink when you eat there, but you have to be manipulated by someone who pretends to be very knowledgeable, even if you come and go from time to time. Once, but never at the right time, and poured the wine almost over the glass, in the Southwest near the US-Mexico border, this type of restaurant will serve Filet Mignon (French Sirloin), which is of good quality. One can imagine. (Residents near the U.S.-Mexico border are mostly poor. The author implies that such restaurants will not have this dish at all, but use this dish name to be arty. A translator’s note) Sometimes the middle class does not go to the above-mentioned restaurants, but They will frequent a kind of "dinner theater" where both the show and the food are guaranteed to be mediocre amateurs, meeting the standards of the middle class who are afraid of challenges, so they are willing to frequent. As for proletarian restaurants, at least there is no element of self-importance.There are no candles and flowers, no fake French accents, no misspelled French words on the menu.In this kind of place, the waiters are ordinary people, like customers, if you have been there for a long time, you will often become familiar with them. "Honey, is your mother's sciatica better?" they'd say.Both customers and waiters want to feel good about each other, not to stay away from each other or belittle each other.Just like eating at home, the poor eat out earlier and sooner.In some minor cities in the Midwest, the lunch of the upper-class poor businessman is overwhelmingly over before 1:30 in the afternoon, after which all the restaurants become empty, except for the staff to set up for dinner. dining table.And dinner is rarely over after six o'clock.The paupers never order unfamiliar dishes in restaurants, that is to say, they only eat things that used to be eaten in college cafeterias or army kitchens, such as ground beef patties, liver with onions or bacon strips, "Swiss" Steak, Fish Friday, and Ricotta.All of this food was fluffy and had obviously been sitting in a steam warmer for a while before being served.In some of the more upscale poor restaurants, people will use stainless steel cutlery to replace the usual disposable cutlery, and some places will have a self-selected salad bar that provides delicacy and other different types of cut vegetables, of course Frozen, and tastes much the same.It's a place where you drink coffee so weak you can see the bottom of the cup, and it's served with your main course. 【TV Food Commercials We can get a glimpse of the eating habits of the poor from TV commercials.There are not many advertisements for food itself, but advertisements for digestive aids are flying all over the sky. Such a large number of advertisements for local digestive medicines is, in my opinion, a phenomenon unique to the United States, at least I am not in the United Kingdom, France, or Italy.Or Germany saw it.Only the United States will develop a huge multi-billion dollar junk food industry for the needs of the poor, and then use a huge junk drug industry to conquer the scourge of junk food.You can easily deduce that many poor people are driven out to have breakfast after seeing a kind of donuts boasted in TV commercials (the food that needs digestive medicine), which makes mothers who want their children to eat breakfast at home often busy in vain.People would go out for breakfast with salty and tasteless bratwurst instead of a delicious home-fried sausage at home.We can look at the explanation of this by Veblen, who specializes in the problem of public consumption.He found that people of lower social class were more likely than those of higher social class to be enticed to display their purchasing power in order to satisfy their desires, even on the morning when the audience was the smallest, and it was likely that the only audience was responding the same Ads come to the poor. 【Super Bowl Party Before turning the conversation away from eating and drinking in relation to TV commercials, we should pause to look at the hierarchical implications of the traditional social event held every January.I'm referring to the "Super Bowl" party.It is primarily a celebration of the poor, though it also occurs among the middle classes.Certainly not in the lowest class of poor families, because poor people never "entertain" or invite guests to their homes (except relatives, of course).At these Super Bowl parties, everyone usually brings their own drinks, but sometimes the organizers will throw a rich and expensive party at their own expense in order to show their financial strength and magnanimity.The hostess hosts an elaborate buffet, and the host offers beer, sometimes even bourbon and ginger ale.In addition, a large-screen color TV (about four hundred dollars) is often rented so that everyone can see the program on it.In some poor neighborhoods, "Super Sunday" is considered the biggest day of the year.Taunting the day means inviting a fight.People have heard of people throwing parties mocking the Super Bowl, but it must have been in New York City or something un-American.It's funny how the entire Super Bowl party was with the TV off and people drinking vodka and talking about everything in life except sports. [weekend In this way, eating habits are an almost unambiguous display of your hierarchical status.Likewise, the way you go to "weekend," "summer," or "travel," as well as your preference for sports (whether you like to try your skills or be a spectator), all have the same effect. The hierarchical concept of "weekend" has undergone a sad and impoverished prostitution process in the past hundred years.The term was coined in 1878, a moment that marked the flourishing of haute bourgeois culture.Back then, a "weekend" might have meant a night at a luxurious villa in the countryside.Weekend guests may need the kind of advice that can still be read in Britain today in Debrett's Manners and Modern Style (1981): "If you plan to stay in a luxurious residence full of people, you are planning to Pack with the best mind in mind that your suitcase may be opened by someone else.” (That said, don’t carry embarrassing sex items).From the beginning of such pomp and pomp, once imitated by today's large upper- or upper-middle classes, "weekend" has become a concept primarily associated with the middle-class or upper-middle class.It meant that modern corporate employers were obliged to follow custom and tradition by granting their weekly wage slaves some brief liberty, and weekends are now largely regarded as the pastime of the poorer classes. He makes this point clearly in the popular "weekend" editions of newspapers like the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, chock-full of business reports and advertisements telling the perceived mindless consumer that he should for something.Previously, weekenders seemed to know how to spend their time without the guidance of businessmen and journalists.In the 1950s, since a cheap cigarette called "Weekend" brand appeared in the French market, "Weekend" began to be treated as a fashionable concept.For the upper class, they neither have an employer nor have to work continuously, and the weekend is not a very meaningful concept. Its impact on the upper class is only limited to the fact that the bank will be closed on weekends. If "weekend" is mainly a concept of the poor class (because it is an employee), then "summer escape" is a concept of the upper middle class or higher.As Lisa Bernbach and her astute colleagues point out: "Summer is the high point of the prep school year...it means. Everything else in life except studies. You choose clothes based on where and how you'll escape the heat .cars. friends. pets. Choose a Jeep because you’re going to spend the summer on rolling terrain. Choose an off-road vehicle because you’re going to travel on rough terrain. Choose a sailboat because you’re going to go sailing in the summer.” And It’s not that the poor don’t escape the summer in their own way, but that they seldom go to the same place every year. The places chosen by the upper class not only look like their family property, but also look more like the places left by their predecessors. under the inheritance.The "summer escape" of the poor class will never last for three months, but a week or two, at most four weeks, they spend their holidays in places specially built for them, such as Disneyland, of course "renting" rooms, and leaving Withdrawal, the public must know what is best, according to the pauper's code, so they go wherever other people go, and when they go, they follow in every queue. 【travel As I've pointed out in other chapters, travel has become so reduced to tourism these days that people hardly think of this old adage if they aren't deliberately sarcastic.So, I simply call this activity travel and tourism.All social classes are victims of this industry, but the poorest suffer the least.This seems to have more to do with their fear of new and unfamiliar twists the activity might offer than with their inability to afford it.All the things that can be expected are what they want, not those that make them unexpected.Ironically, all that the tourism industry can offer right now is exactly what can be expected.Arthur B. Shostak noted in Blue Collar Life (1969) that the poor tend to choose such leisure experiences: "They can verify the knowledge that has been acquired, rather than interacting with even the things in the novel. Conflicting things, things that are unfamiliar can pose a serious threat to the poor. Tourism, they argue, is rife with innumerable threats: "You have to deal with strangers, deftly playing various characters, and shrewdness in dealing with new and unexpected problems...the fear of being 'taken',...the provincial ignorance of where to go, the sense that nowhere else is worth visiting, Unfounded egos, and a preference for the home version. "These fears often limit the travel of the poor. They either go out with relatives and friends, or drive to the funeral of relatives and friends by themselves. If they do travel once, they will think about it for years, and they can't stop remembering the food, mileage, consumption and The luxury of the motel and all the details, like: "They actually put a strip of paper on the toilet seat," they'd say. The vast majority of the tourist class is the middle class.They have turned Hawaii into, as Roger Price maliciously named it, the "Valhalla of the masses" Temple of theIt is because of the middle class that the luxury cruise business is profitable, because people of this class assume that they will be on a cruise ship with the upper middle class, not realizing that the latter may either be visiting from a mosque in Istanbul Peeping out of the spiers of the nearby villas, or hiding in a valley in Nepal, or simply staying at home in Old Lyme, Connecticut, playing dick and flipping through Town and Country magazine.Tourism is deeply loved by the middle class because they can "buy a feeling" from it, as C. Wright Mills said, "even if only for a short time, a higher-class feeling." He also pointed out that tourism (或度假村）行业人员和他们的顾客们合作上演一套装模作样的把戏，并按中上阶层（或者上层）才熟悉的程序，煞有介事地表演大量的“侍候进餐”，白色餐桌台布，“发泡葡萄酒”，假鱼子酱。只消注意旅游业广告中“昂贵享受”(以及“美食”)一词出现得有多频繁，就会明启我究竟在说什么。这是因为，比起住房、汽车或其他显眼的地方性消费项目，中产阶级更嫉妒更高阶层的出外旅游。理查德·卜科尔曼和李·雷沃特在他们的作品《美国的社会阶层》中发现，这种嫉妒不止是经济上的——还是“文化上的”：上层人物对遥远地域的经验“象征了文化上的优越地位，”上层人的旅游习惯“似乎表明，游客已经在这种环境背景中感到很舒适了，或者他的感觉正在变得越来越如此。” 上层的人们通常自己出游，不加入什么团体。这很自然，因为不管在什么团体里，总会有些你懒得去结识的人物。当然也有例外，比如由某大学组织的“艺术观光团”，游伴常常是一些资格相当的成员，带队也不会是导游，而是“讲师”或“艺术史专家”。上层人士感到，参加这类观光旅游团会暗示你的无知、智力上的懒惰和缺乏好奇心。这就像参加一次平庸俗气的“导游观光”所暗示的情形一样严重。但是，由于你是在观看艺术，同时还能从地位较高的高等学府的声望当中借来几许声望，等级趣味上终究还有应计的收益。