Chapter 11 Part 8 Rising and Falling: The Trend of Prostitution

【climb up The difficulty of changing class attributes has not frightened the millions of people who are determined to climb up, nor has it frightened the thousands of people who are eager to sink.It is sad to count the energy wasted in these two pursuits.Sociologist August Hollingschede called those who do whatever it takes to climb up "strugglers," not "climbers."As far as we know, some of these strivers are clients of Roxanne Weissman, a status therapist in Washington, D.C., who technically coaches ambitious people on how to climb to the top.She advises those who are so eager to put their names in the rambling columns of the local paper first, and wait for invitations to government gatherings to follow.It is a pity that government parties are always closed to those at the bottom of society. For those who are marching up the upper class, sometimes outright lies can have unexpected effects in the short term.Says one gatekeeper: "When someone at a party says to me 'Where did you get a job?', I just tell them nonsense and tell them... 'I'm a practicing accountant'"

Some of the most assiduous ranks are college professors, whose code Wright Mills holds: "Man can achieve status in this field," he said upon realizing it, "despite their origins. In the middle and lower classes, and the social environment of this class is not known for the common sense of the mind, the breadth and depth of the culture, and the richness of the imagination, many people in this occupation have experienced a certain rise in class status, and are climbing What they acquire in the process of learning is more knowledge than social graces. There are also some people who maintain a vulgar cultural taste and a mediocre way of life outside their majors.” Therefore, the poor class of these professors Instinct drags them to bowling, while another part pulls them up, all the way to the most prestigious retreats and expensive summer vacations with a group of inheritances.

The mail-order catalogs we've seen have much to do with middle-class people who yearn desperately for advancement but whose circumstances make it possible only in fantasy.By buying things like "Preppy Drink Shirts" T-shirts, these middle-class people go out of their way to elevate themselves to upper-middle-class status, rather than hovering below a social status they'll never reach. (The mail-order catalog also offers other items, such as a musical dustpan that plays "Born Free" when you unfold it; and "The World's Smallest Harmonica." These things couldn't be more clear than he illustrates the true value of preppy drink shirts. Advocate Mentality J Another mail order company also caters well to the unrealistically bent on climbing with a 9x12 foot wallpaper panel that's actually a richly colored dark brown photography A realistic mural depicting a doorway formed by the interlocking bookcases of the kind found in high society libraries: parquet flooring, hardwood joinery, and leather-bound books flanking the strikingly spacious doorway Lots of decorative stripes. People put this wallpaper on their bourgeois living room walls—"it still looks like wallpaper"—but every time you look at it, especially if you squint your eyes or get a little drunk, You can imagine yourself rising in class to your heart's content.

【Sink If climbing up is easy to understand, whether in reality or in fantasy, then the desire to descend to the bottom of society is inconceivable, although there are more such things than most people notice.The difference in behavior between gays and lesbians exemplifies these two diametrically opposed movements.Ambitious gay men, at least in fantasy, eagerly aspire to leap from their humble beginnings to curio shop.Owner of art gallery and beauty salon.This can be achieved through constant contact with well-known personalities.They imitate elegant voices when they call, and are instinctively attracted to "style" and high society.Lesbians are just the opposite, they like to sink, from middle class to taxi drivers, cops.construction worker.The ultimate gay man's dream is to sit around an elegant dining table with flowers, placemats and glass finger-washing bowls, surrounded by success.Wealthy and richly dressed.Tactful, cunning, and people who don't care about morality.The ultimate lesbian dream is to wear work clothes, join tall, muscular members of the proletariat, have lunch with friends, shout and joke without restraint.

Like lesbians, sometimes literati also show an excessive and unrestrained desire to sink, such as TE Lawrence joining the Royal Air Force as a soldier; Norman Mailer and the murderous pauper Jack Henry Did Abbott form an alliance because they felt guilty for the benefits of the class education they had received?Alcoholism is the most common route to sinking, one look at Bowie is enough to confirm this, and since writers have traditionally been alcoholics, we can expect that many of them, by this means, are trying to contribute to decline in one's own class status.Writers and men of letters also gratified their sinking desires by imitating the poorer classes, wearing painters' overalls like those Ivy League students, or joining commoner societies, or dressing like lowly young men. People, be Leslie.What Fiedler calls a "fake teenage civilian."

The idea of ​​just slipping down a notch is simply not feasible, if you are upper-middle or middle class, to successfully descend you have to go down very deep.But almost no one has really succeeded in falling, just as no one has successfully entered Vanity Fair.No matter how hard you try, if your conversation doesn't give you away, your grammar, your taste in clothes, cars, or the spiritual life will.The upper-class people who visit the slums are often the object of ridicule by the poor because they don't drop the "g" sound in their speech, and the poor who mix in the upper-class make a big mistake by showing that they don't know how to eat Jerusalem artichokes .

Of course, there are many people whose social status has been lowered unintentionally at all.inflation.Unemployment, stagnant economy.And declining productivity makes Paul.What Bramberg called the "Europeanization of the American class system"—"a more rigid social structure, greater inequality of wealth" became evident.After decades of progress, “the American masses now find themselves . It seems that only the bottom of society have enough shelter." 【Trends of Poorization It is pessimistic that it can be said that the whole society is in the process of sinking.We may call this the tendency towards the ghetto, a term that implies that in advanced industrialized societies everything tends to be impoverished without exception.The pauperization trend seems to be mass production, mass sales.The inevitable accompaniment of mass communication and mass education.Some important signs are in the list of best-selling books, movies that appeal to everyone (except the smart, sensitive and meticulous), shopping malls.And people flying like lemmings to the Sunbelt where knowledge and culture are lacking.The gentrification trend is another term for what Bramberg calls the Howard Johnsonization of America.Ortega Gasset said in "The Revolt of the Masses" (1930): "The present age is characterized by the mediocrity of thought. Knowing its mediocrity, it is still allowed to be imposed on people everywhere." As Donald As a result of this process, Basel thumb pointed out, the wine of life became "Gyta Liquor" (a drink for athletes, containing glucose, citric acid, sodium bicarbonate and potassium chloride, etc. A Translator's Note), this statement is a revised version of Ezra Pound's earlier observation that the player piano is rapidly replacing the sappho.Proverbs are a topic that thoughtful people talk about all the time.

Looking at magazines and newspapers, evidence of gentrification tends to be everywhere, and serious history students who study ghetto trends find that as early as the 1940s the summary of content on the cover of The Atlantic Monthly has disappeared, replaced by "pictures" .What's going on here?A logical critic would draw the conclusion that the formerly accustomed readership of the written word is dying out, or being blinded by old age, and that the new educated can never be re-formed in the old way. A reader layer.Look at the face of the newspapers and we will find more evidence of the tendency towards pauperization.Anthropologist Maslow Douz studied the nation's newspapers in 1972 and found that twenty years ago only about a hundred of the 1,750 dailies contained astrology columns, whereas now there are Twelve hundred species.Or look at the advertisements in The New Republic, a magazine that even the advertisers thought had a readership of liberals, skeptics, and atheists.Intellectuals and organized dissenters.And below is an ad that appeared in 1982

Pastor Phyllis Mitchell past Now future astrological wood poker divination psychometric instrument Three questions for $10. "highly accurate" Another ad was aimed at the "new" readers of The New Republic. The writer of the ad thought that probably because they went to high school in the United States, they couldn't even do simple math operations, so for them, an essential life tool is Tip Calculator, a wallet-sized card that helps you quickly calculate a fifteen percent tip.It sells for $1.Box 720, Rushmetix Township, Tillamook County, Oregon From the costly adverts that recently took up a quarter of its page, we can guess that the advertisers must think that the New York Times readership is also becoming impoverished.We’re talking here about the commemorative American Eagle buckle, a silver belt buckle that features an eagle against a mountain backdrop and is usually only adored by disheveled cowboys or teens. "These belt buckles will be out of print," the ad said, "and after one year its metal casting will be permanently destroyed." If you get it, people will naturally be tempted by the temptation of "collection".Now it is aimed at brokers, foundation administrators, university presidents.Scholars, doctors and lawyers.

A business is a business, and we can make a pretty safe guess about that.Just four days after the New York Times belt buckle scandal, there is no better example of the tendency towards pauperization than a statement published in the always sacrosanct London Times Literary Supplement .The weekly has always been the domain of the rhetorical and verbal class, but let's see where it is now: Times Literary Supplement readers include Publishers, Scholars and all with the literary world relevant persons. So far, there is no serious problem, except that the word "报" is missing after "The Times", an oversight that can be attributed to the typesetting staff.But the following would suck:

Therefore, it is an ideal mass medium, You can advertise on it, Hire senior management and editors. As soon as you ask what's been going on in your local bookstore lately, you'll come across signs of a similar gentrification trend.The main thing is not that they sell calendars there.Hitchcat posters, greeting cards, and paper dolls, but book sales perfectly illustrate Roger Price's first law: "If something nobody wants, nobody will get it." .” It used to be that you could order any book that had been published and get it in a bookstore within a week or so.Not anymore, and it is shocking that even the most stubborn people are insulated from such things.Chain Bookstores—Is There Any Other Way? — not only the subscription fee of two dollars, but also a deposit of half the price of the book.Trying to rationalize these barriers, they gave the old "order" a new name.To highlight how difficult the process is and how good the service is, they call it "special ordering," which makes it sound off-the-wall, difficult, and almost impossible.The effect was dramatic, as customers were encouraged to rely solely on the bestseller list, keeping their interest only in those things that the bookstore manager (formerly the bookseller) believed would be highly profitable by ordering in bulk. The customer quickly learns that he should never have walked into a bookstore if he was a fool.Ask the salesperson: "Do you have Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy?" or "Do you have Freud's Civilization and Discontent?" and Ann Landers (both American popular writers. A translator's note) works.Why even be curious about the above?In another example of the ghettoizing trend in the book world, the National Book Award is being replaced by the American Book Award, which is subtly similar in name but quite different in meaning.Past National Book Awards have had the obvious merit of judging by impartial and knowledgeable judges.The current American Book Awards are decided by publishers, editors, advertisers, sales staff and bookstore employees. It is not about the quality of the book, but its popularity and market potential.The new “special ordering” of bookstores and the commercialization of book prizes, two novelties that may seem trivial, are culturally a national disaster.The evidence, right here near where you live, bears out Ortega's gloomy findings: "The public has smashed everything around it that's different, everything that's good. Unique, timeless and classic." In this way, the proletariat, who appear to be losers on the surface, are in fact always winners.Ortega wrote in 1930 that the emerging poorer classes were "aggressors of all classes," forcing their way to defile hitherto sacrosanct art.culture.Complex and delicate fields.However, time has shown that the poor have in fact stayed put, that no class has been invaded, but that the top of society has automatically slipped down to adapt itself to their needs, as purchasing power is increasingly concentrated in the hands of the poor. Further evidence of the tendency to ghetto, if it is needed at all, is the customers in the shops, the markets.Performance of banks and post offices.Queues—an infallible signal of ghettoization, whether in Eastern Europe or the free world—are now commonplace everywhere.Listless customers wait with animal patience while staff chitchat endlessly on their phones or disappear inexplicably for a while.Why not wait?Anyway, the customer has long been used to seeing himself as a slave, an insignificant person, and never complains.A retail transaction now takes three times as long as it did ten years ago, because computerized payment operations are required, and there is no objection to that.The more common and necessary and acceptable such delays are, you know, the more pauperized we become.Also common and acceptable is the disappearance of mutual greetings and services, and the general practice of "self-help" in shops and businesses of all kinds (as if it were a good thing).In fact, self-help is the most proletarian.The poor liked it because it minimized the danger of humiliation in the transaction.That's fine with them, but because of the gentrification trend, we all have to act like dejected scumbags. Different things used to have different advocates, and those who went to see "My Fair Lady" never liked watching "A Different Way" on TV.And now Broadway musicals are routinely advertised on television, as if they have the same audience.And, the makers of musicals ask those who have avowedly disliked wit, delicacy, subtlety, and stylization to see their work.The musical "Forty-Second Street" has nothing to do with its glamour, except for its ghetto clichés.Thanks to its makers' relentless TV hype, it naturally appealed to the same audience as "Three Walking" and "Love Boat." In a related sign of the gentrification trend, rather its rapidity, two good New York theaters were replaced by a lousy restaurant.This happened in the spring of 1982, when the manufacturer of the Chekel taxi (an old-fashioned taxi. A translator's note) issued a statement stating that it would no longer produce this kind of car.I think this is the single most civilized taxi in America.At the same time, American brewers were bringing into the open what some astute minds had known for years—the gentrification of the American beer industry.The brewers specifically mention that they reduced the amount of hops, which make the beer boozy and bitter.The poor like it light and slightly sweet, so, as one brewing spokesman puts it, "in the last ten years, the bitterness of American beer has dropped by about 20 percent, and the whole beer has gone lighter." That's you and me, friend The wine being drunk, there is no choice but to emigrate or have enough money to consume beer imported from Germany or Holland. Perhaps things are not quite as Auden says: knowledge out of favor It's evident on every face but if you think about the pauperization of architectural styles since World War II, you'll see that things are getting worse.Now, identical rectangular brick boxes are used for churches, schools, hospitals, prisons, dormitories, and motels.Fire stations, or commercial office buildings.This one-size-fits-all brick box suggests that not only is no one interested in apparent differences in use, but no one is interested in differences at all. Of course, quite some time ago, the traces of civilization disappeared from public buildings.Now you can only search for acorns in vain.Wreaths, balustrades, pinnacles, triangular troughs—all those once-common ornaments, which once suggested a world larger than the local and a purpose higher than utility, have now vanished without a trace up.Sadly, we do deserve what we deserve.A society dominated by the trend of pauperization will inevitably bring about pauperized buildings, which is well described in Kingsley Amis's poem "Aberdas: The Central Square": Next to the new boots, there was a toolbox flagpole stuck in it, wheel rims, and a dirty turret doorway, something like a porthole, where Evans and Mrs. Race had their first tryst.Bonash House, dedicated to gentlemen's clothing, Jacob White style.Real wood nailed down to every beam, honestly, everywhere she said "okay" when they were having lunch at the Three Lights restaurant.He put her on the castle pier next to the big grime-stained pier, and might be lucky to break down one day in the Saturday Evening Post, while they were sneaking away from Potter Cow for their ill-fated weekend return.Some architects' notes say it is the worst city center they have found; but does that put it too lightly?When it so diligently reflects the mind's ever-present tendencies? All love demands the proof that there is "something" in the heart and is therefore separate from itself.The two probably found Carlton House Lane, St. Mark's Square, and a small piece on the magnificent side.what about you?