Chapter 9 Part Six Intellectual Life (2)

【Readings Whether you go to a good college or a bad college, a good prep school or a high school, you're pretty much a class badge. "The distinction itself between those who read and write and those who don't," says Tom Wolfe, "carries a great social stratification." It doesn't matter.The taste for reading among the upper classes will soon pass away. C. Ritter Mill was right when he observed that although they sometimes spread out the books, they didn't intend to read them at all unless they were "management books, or fascinating myths and detective stories, too Pain and forget it." Their favorite magazines were, to be precise, those upper-middle-class tastes of Time, Newsweek, which John Molloy spoke of in company waiting rooms. and U.S. News & World Report; or add Fortune, Forbes, BusinessWeek.If you're a writer and you give a member of the upper class a copy of your book, you don't expect the guy to read it.

The reading interest of the poor class will not delay most of our time.Popular products here are Reader's Digest (circulation 17.87 million copies), TV Guide (17.67 million copies), popular among the upper poor, along with magazines like the New York Daily News. News, and the lower-middle-class favorites like The National Enquirer, The Weekly World News, The Weekly Star, and The Globe, which you can reach for in supermarkets.This category is filled with medieval miracles, magic, and plausible scientific myths (life from outer space, "traveling" outside the body, triumph of the mind, etc.).At first glance, all this low taste may seem to illustrate the general failure of public secondary education, but a closer look reveals that the editors of these books often play with great skill back and forth between fact and fiction to deceive readers. interest of.Look at stuff like this: "Hitler, Now 93, Behind the Scenes of Argentina's Invasion of the Falkland Islands," or "Senior Scientist Talks to the Dead." Former marriage predictor and family counselor, and no harm done.The proletarian periodicals catered only to readers' voyeuristic desires and flooded with gossip about the private lives of famous people.The point is that, like a pub talk about a sporting event, this type of content gives the poorer class a false sense of power, making him feel like he's in charge of the big shots, or at least he can decide who gets to Whoever succeeds will fail.But despite the wonders and scandals of these poor books, we find that none of the periodicals seeks to stimulate the troubles of the poor classes, whose essential function is to appease and console:

Coffee and Alcohol Can Help You Lose Weight Hooray, America (Living in America just keeps getting better, and it will get better.) To appeal to the sensibility of the poorer classes, they use this method: they first present an opinion and then declare it to be fact.Sometimes they entertain the old, the lowly, and the weak with brave, noble, or good news about "immortality," such as: I didn't make it across the mountains at 72, but I sailed across the Atlantic, all by myself. A seasonal farm worker and his wife put their 12 children through college. The vast majority of MPs believe in the resurrection after death.

In the end, thinking about these things, we can't help feeling an ill-founded sense of superiority.But don't forget that it's not just the proletarian periodicals that spout nonsense out of thin air, here's an ad in The New Republic that, like the rest of that rare periodical, is supposed to be aimed at reasonable people, Liberals, "college graduates."and other insightful ones: Jesus is a fictional character!The smoking gun shows that Flavius. Josephus created Jesus and wrote the Gospels.Paperback. three dollars. Also in the same issue: The end of the world is near.Hurry up to buy.Send $1 with you.

As a reader, the proles are honest and make no attempt to affect or arty what is refined.Only among the middle class is reading taste a topic of interest to researchers.Among these people, pretense, deceit, and distortion prevail.The upper classes don't care what you think of what they read, and neither do the poor.The penniless and anxious middle-class is the kind of person who wants you to believe he's reading "the best literature," and the accusations of "rags" and "garbage" are often on their lips.They are the ones that make it hard to read.Natural reader of pretentious second-rate books such as James Gould Cozens, John Steinbeck, Pearl Buck, Lawrence Durell's Alexander Quartet, and Herman Walker, John Hull Cy, Owen Shaw's hodgepodge dumping, and Durant's history of philosophy.The most revered classic of the middle class is, and in fact Hemingway literally had to write it, because Salton Wilder stopped writing, thus leaving a void to be filled.The middle class hated Dylan Thomas (Jimmy Carter made him his favorite poet), largely because his recordings of recitals had a tendency to relegate poetry to turned into stereo music.It is in the homes of the middle class that you will see the 54 volumes of "World Classics" and the 2 volumes of the quasi-academic "Harmony", because the middle class believes in authority, and they are the largest readers of guide books, It is also a traditional sales market for encyclopedias. In the maple cabinet, the latest recommendations of the "Book of the Month Club" must be displayed, placed together with personal collections. (If you went to a bad college, the bookshelves would be recommendations from the Literary Guide book club; order book.)

Of course, the middle class is only keen to read non-ideological periodicals, better like "National Geographic" and "Smithsonian Institution Proceedings" (Smithsonian Institution, named after its founder Smithson, both National Museum of America. A translator's note) and "Housing and Gardening". National Geographic still has back-cover ads selling expensive military schools and disciplined training camps to the upper-middle class so they can send their disobedient and marijuana-smoking sons to suffer.These ads offer a lot to the imagination of the middle class who cannot afford to do so. Psychology Today gave the middle class the illusion that it could keep up with ever-changing scientific developments, while The New Yorker convinced the middle class that it cared about culture and finer things like Stauben glassware.If the poor read Popular Technology, the college-educated middle class reads Science Digest.The freer a middle-class man is in his self-imagination, the more likely you are to see a Consumer Guide somewhere in his home.Designers of mail-order catalogs have learned that their customers like to be thought of as readers of their own class, and that the way to please them is to raise their ranks unconsciously.A typical middle-class mail-order catalog, for example, promotes a gaudy doormat aimed at readers of the New Brunswick Residential Information, but has The New York Times printed on it.The same mail-order catalog also appeals to people to "please keep the waste newspapers neatly for recycling", and the picture next to it shows a cast-iron newspaper rack with a stack of newspapers neatly stacked on it.Guess what newspaper is the top one? The Omaha Herald-Tribune?That's right, the Wall Street Journal.By the same token, a mail-order catalog aimed at the upper-class advert for reproductions of antique Western furniture would not have "Family Circle" and "Field and River" on a magazine rack next to a chair. The only publications this class reads that we can think of are magazines like The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Smithsonian Proceedings.

Before we put aside the topic of middle-class reading tastes, we cannot fail to notice the impact of their reading tastes on American writing style.The fear of ideology, opinion, and sharp thought (we have already learned before in their resistance to modern art) is the main reason for the prevalence of euphemisms, polite speech, jargon, and wordplay.Middle-class concerns about “controversy” have led The New Yorker almost never to publish book reviews that readers don’t like, such as embarrassing, vitriolic, and overly targeted articles.It's better to speak mildly and flatteringly, then avoid all trouble through understatement, ambiguity, and evasion.The style of writing that the middle class needs is essentially the style of big institutional propaganda, produced by some of the most cunning big corporations in imitation of the phony naiveté of The New Yorker's "Talk about the City" section.Mobile Oil is the best at this, pretending to be ignorant (Mobile would say: "We don't know..."), and saying the most banal things to comfort others, as if otherwise they would drew condemnation from elites. "The world will not end on Wednesday, March 10, 1982, as some feared," it read in an ad a week later:

The truth is that on that day all the planets were aligned in a syzygy pattern, meaning that they were all on one side of the sun. (We also didn't know what the word syzygy meant, so we looked it up in the dictionary...) If the world isn't going to end in the foreseeable future, then why don't we make her a more livable place? The latter paragraph reminds us that we must make the middle class understandable.How integral are the clichés and commonplaces.The fortunately educated read to be amazed, while the middle class read to be affirmed.Deviations from the customary rules of language embarrass and upset the middle class.

【Bible The middle class is the overwhelming readership of countless "new translations" ("rewritten versions" seem to be a better term) of the Bible.Needless to say, these "new translations" have brought shame to our time compared with previous ones.It is worth noting that these new versions will not be considered necessary at all until the so-called globalization of education becomes commonplace.People so unfortunately educated, so ignorant not only of historical points of view, but of style and idiom, would be baffled by any English of any age but modern English, so that even the middle classes Divinity is also required to be expressed in "easy-to-understand language."Suppose, as Auden said,

time…… cult language, and forgive each The people it lives on, then, the middle class hate and fear language.In fact, this class insists that a class distinction should be made according to the following example.Those who like the "Wherever you go, I will go" ("Bible: Luther" 1:16) version of the Bible should be distinguished from those who like this version; of course the middle class does not hesitate I love the latter.Thus, due to different education, different expectations and different psychological circumstances, the various classes not only read different things, but, as a consequence of this reading, to a large extent believe different things.It is this difference, as much as any other, that has shaped America as the nation defined in Richard Polenberg's A Nation Divided (1980).

【Concept The two upper classes, as we have seen, do not have many views and opinions.One of the few points they like to make often is that the capital must not be "violated".There is another point of view: suits and ties must not be ignored.Apart from these two, they have few established beliefs.They don't even believe in culture, like the upper middle class.Or if they believe in culture, they only like culture accompanied by other things.Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney loved Saratoga Hot Springs because he found it “has the art and the best horse racing in America.” Aspen, Colorado, was a cultural mecca for the upper class, not only Not only because it costs a lot to go there, but also because there you can enjoy culture, "view" and leisure-class sports at the same time (Aspen is a famous ski resort in the United States, with unique scenery, annual summer concerts Very famous. A translator's note). On the other hand, the middle class believes in many things.It believes in constipation, for example, and that if you don't "poop once a day," you're in big trouble and must take a laxative right away, preferably the kind advertised on TV.It's a bit like keeping your kitchen spotless to avoid blame, the middle class wants their bowels to be clean and not look like a disgraceful stain. "I'm learning about gastroenterology," a young woman told Starz Tucker, "our digestive system is not clean." The middle class also firmly believes that one should become a professional at all costs, as a dentist Or a veterinarian has more status than being a salaried employee.They believe that leather is better than anything else, that you can be judged by your suitcase, and that you should be well dressed when traveling.They believed that Peter Shaffier was a thoughtful playwright, probably as good as Shakespeare (as Durer was as much as Proust).And, when watching a play, they are sure to stand and applaud after hearing the psychoanalyst's speech.They also had a sort of architectural eye, thinking that the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center was beautiful, with all the gold and chicken-blood decorations and all the little light bulbs hanging from them. (Here's a simple quiz: A person who climaxes when he or she hears the cuckoo call in Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony must be middle class. "Stand above the coach station, and, with their obsession with efficiency and progress, they believe that a single home or personal computer can solve all of life's problems. (This is the middle class of the poor who believe in "debt adjustment" version.) The middle-class belief in electrification as a solution to human problems is a triumph of a TV ad in which a father announces at his daughter's wedding that he will give her a computer as a wedding present. This ad hit the hearts of the audience (especially the middle class), which can be described as clever. What the poor believe is more interesting in almost every respect than the middle class.Would a middle-class man, for example, believe that dreams had meaning and could be verified from the "Dream Book"?Do they believe that copper hand pot can cure rheumatism?Believe that betting on the racetrack has a good chance of winning a large sum of money?Do you believe that the government mixes Australian compounds in the food of soldiers to reduce their libido?Do you believe Leotrier will conquer cancer?Believe that there is no contradiction in the concept of "creative science"?Believe it's okay to kill openly just by "inventing" something (like "an anti-gravity belt or something")?Or believe, as a Manhattan hotel bellman supposedly once said, that cripples and deformed people are punished by being "reincarnated" for evil in previous lives?Believe that Esperanto is a solution to all the misunderstandings in the world?Do you believe it's not absurd to have a "Women's Aid Organization" as long as it's associated with elk, the American Legion, or the ancient Irish order?Don't you believe it's not funny or outlandish to call a tennis tournament the "Congrum Classic"?All these are things that the poor class like to believe.They're clearly more interesting than the middle class. The middle-class heart thumps when it sees an ugly Tiffany jewelry ad, while an ad that claims to relieve an itchy rectum or boasts that a book on poker will give buyers a "lifetime income" , the poor will be equally excited and hopeful. The greatest difference between the poor and the middle class is their humility towards superstition.It is the majority of proletarians who believe that buildings cannot have 13 floors, and that 13 is not used in racing cars.Indeed, just as big numbers (always preceded by a dollar sign) are deeply ingrained in the minds of the upper and upper middle classes, the poor also love numbers, such as sports scores that often mean a lot to them, and lucky numbers and lotto prize ticket numbers and more.Not long ago, I was queuing at a newsstand at an airport. In front of me was a poor man, and his wife was standing not far away.He bought a magazine and chewing gum for $2.65, and then yelled at his wife, so that everyone could hear him, that he was a good athlete: "Remember! 65 is our (lottery) numbers!" The poor read astrology voraciously, often taking astrological advice.They believe that there is a "fate" of winning and losing, which is immutable, and they also believe in gambling.Believing that supernatural powers can help you find lost things, they placed acknowledgments of St. Anthony's help in the newspaper classifieds.They believe in God.They respond to direct mail ads like this: Do you need help?Do you need to pray?Are you in trouble?are you alone?Do you need constant blessings of money? ...I am sending you the "Golden Cross of Wealth".As I ordered, do not send any money. Tocqueville once concluded that "religious madness is very common in America." While it might be fun to follow his conclusions, it is too big a topic for this book, and it should not Discuss issues of rank in terms of faith.However, in the end we cannot fail to notice the significance of social stratification contained in the funeral behavior of various classes.Perhaps the most important difference between upper and lower classes (whatever class they are defined) is that when people are buried in winter, poor families put a flowered blanket over the coffin to keep the dead warm, while the upper class is Wouldn't have thought about it.The other line is that upper-class funerals are spectacular and advertised in the obituary column of the newspaper, while lower-class families don't.Jiri Cooper excerpted (or composed) a famous quote: God took daddy to heaven, That was his old man's wish. But why is it so, We still think about it all day. With the deepest love.Miss you forever: Doris, Sharon, Aunt Edna and little Terry. But it's best not to delve too deeply into such matters.We should take the warning of a midwestern high school kid and stay away from such topics.He replied to a sociologist who was doing social research: "Yeah, we smoke weed everywhere. In the car, when we're wandering around before class, whatever. But that doesn't mean Say, we don't believe in God, or we'll allow someone to overthrow God."