Shock Horror! NYT in US Class System Probe!
The New York Times has finally noticed that there might just be this little thing in the US called a class system, and that it might have an adverse affect on people’s life chances…
Today, the country has gone a long way toward an appearance of classlessness. Americans of all sorts are awash in luxuries that would have dazzled their grandparents. Social diversity has erased many of the old markers. It has become harder to read people’s status in the clothes they wear, the cars they drive, the votes they cast, the god they worship, the color of their skin. The contours of class have blurred; some say they have disappeared.
But class is still a powerful force in American life. Over the past three decades, it has come to play a greater, not lesser, role in important ways. At a time when education matters more than ever, success in school remains linked tightly to class. At a time when the country is increasingly integrated racially, the rich are isolating themselves more and more. At a time of extraordinary advances in medicine, class differences in health and lifespan are wide and appear to be widening.
This is where I bang my head on the kb. Well DUH. It’s all very well the NYT deigning to notice that poorer people don’t do so well and the mega-rich get all the breaks, but Grey Lady maintains its de haut en bas attitude, that ‘oh dear, isn’t it terrible for those poor people’ frame of mind, knowing it’s not a problem for the Times staff themselves (well, other than for the immigrant janitors that clean the newsroom). Thus it tries to stick to the classic US journalism point of view, ie no point of view at all. Just the usual ‘he said, they said’, supposedly fair and balanced hear-from-both-sides article that obfuscates rather than illuminates any issue. If it takes any point of view at all, it’s the panglossian perspective. There is social mobility, be all you can be, everything is for the best. It’s a bit hard for some people, but on the whole, the US is A-OK. Maintain the status quo and we’ll all be fine.
Bollocks to that.
