April 23, 2008
Class actsSOMETIMES THE NEWS sounds like it’s a literal translation from Albanian. The words are familiar. But they don’t make any sense… Maybe Humpty Dumpty has been running the show. You remember, the ovoid figure Alice encounters in Through the Looking Glass:
Like Alice, my head is spinning. YESTERDAY BEGAN COLD & GRAY, so I made a strong cup of coffee & curled up on the couch with the San Francisco Chronicle. I don’t mean to pick on the Chron. It could have been any newspaper… Outside, the fog hovered far off, outside the Golden Gate. In my living room, even though the words on the page in front of me were bright & clear, their meaning was decidedly fuzzy. I considered importing a foghorn from the bridge… Reasoning that bellowing never solved anything, I didn’t. Instead, I got lost in the pea soup that passed for news. Floundering like the Cosco Busan, I crashed right into the first story. A STUDY conducted by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health and the University of Washington found,
Americans — even white Americans — are dying early. Scary stuff. But what’s this “income” stuff? Alameda County Health Officer Dr. Anthony Iton added some local observations:
Even scarier. What’s going on? The Humpty Dumpty reporters masterfully avoided using the one word that would best explain the situation: class. The story circled all around it, like a parent playing hide & seek with a toddler, but the word never appears. Never. Why not? It’s a perfectly good word. But Humpty Dumpty hasn’t mastered it. AS EVERYBODY KNOWS, there are races in the United States & genders. But only one class. And all of us — Bill Gates & Joe Sixpack alike — are part of it… Everybody but Harvard University knows that. In a recent roundtable discussion, Harvard social scientists asked, “Is the United States Coming Apart As a Society?” Their response:
The shocking fact is that they used the word class at all. But Harvard being Harvard, I guess it can afford to shock. They continue,
Public discourse. That’s the substance of our political discussions. As the present presidential campaign has made clear, American politics is all about race & gender. The smart folks at Harvard have noticed the problem as well:
Yup. It’s hard to pay much attention to a problem that has no name.
Kinda sends chills up your spine, doesn’t it, to hear that word spoken out loud in polite company… But Harvard takes its role as educator of the elite very seriously.
Maybe they could give a class on the subject to reporters as well. AS THE DAY WENT ON, Humpty Dumpty continued his disconnect between the world as he defined it and the world we live in… Early in the evening, SFGate updated its website with the news people had waited for all day:
And in the manner that bloggers worldwide have come to know and love, the story concluded:
MY FIRST THOUGHTS were unprintable. So were my second… How does a thoughtful person respond to an election that’s based on bowling and beer? Then I remembered the words of a writer far more skilled than I:
Hooray for Jon Carroll! Forget about that foghorn on the Golden Gate Bridge. It just makes a lot of noise anyway… Cut & paste Carroll’s column onto an email form & send it to every politician & media maven you can think of. Start at the top: Thanks for reading. I’m outta here till Friday. — Copyright Betsey Culp 2008
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