Current music:	Hell Bent for Leather
Entry tags:	class

Stuff White People Like: the 21st Century Preppy Handbook
Another good blog out there is Stuff White People Like. Everyone knows about this one (unlike The Macho Response -which deserves to be better known) -it's been featured on NPR dontcha know.



The funny thing about it is all the comments inside accusing the author of howwible racism against the poor oppressed white people of the world whose feelings might be hurt by the fact that they embody a stereotype so perfectly. Or the befuddled tight-assed brown people who think that it is odd that all of these things happen to apply to them. They don't seem to realize that this isn't about race at all; that’s the genius of it. It is about what American class striving has turned into. This is about annoying upper middle class (and of course, people who want to appear upper middle class) urban Americans and their class anxieties. Turning it into “white people” is a stroke of genius: it drives such people bonkers to point out that they’re exactly the same nasty little clique that used to exclude other races. Sure, now the clique has a fashionable sprinkle of melanin in it. So what? They’re the cultural descendants of unfashionable northern prig honkeys, not black southern blues guitarists like they try to picture themselves as.

"I hope Paul Fussel looks at this picture and laughs his ass off. I mean, they're so upper middle class as to be beyond parody; right down to multiple layers of undergarments. Of course, their meaningless cry for attention: as upper middle class as driving a Volvo."


Class striving is always funny, because it's pathetic. People attempting to one up each other with mock erudition or milquetoast sanctimony is one of the funniest things one can witness on god's green earth. It's always been hilarious. There are whole genres of pre-1960s comedy based on the subject. What makes this generation of upper middle class ding-dongs particularly ripe targets is they picture themselves as brave rebels, rather than the pathetic social climbers they actually are. They're not rebelling against the upper middle class; they're trying to be the upper middle class. They're so addlepated, they don't realize that their image of the upper middle class they're rebelling against is incorrect. The upper middle class no longer wears ties and buys yachts. Now they wear sloppy clothes and buy hybrid vehicles, and expensive Kitchenwear they'll never use. They still go to Europe, but they do it grubbins rather than grand tour fashion and they also go to absurd Third World Hellholes ... for the "authenticity" of it all.


"Hello backpacking honkey morons: nice babooshka -I bet you went to Harvard!"


I’m physically as white as they come, but I like almost exactly none of the things listed on this website because I am not ashamed that I come from the lower classes. I like cheap beer and hot dogs, and I drive a pickup truck. I don't do yoga: I lift weights. I have no class anxieties, because I'm unabashedly lower middle class. Sure, I have a Ph.D., and I'm happy to trot it and my reading out in front of simpering gasbags like the ones on StuffWhitePeopleLike, though these days I just as often would rather they think I'm a dumb bastard. Who cares? I am almost certainly smarter, and even if I'm not: I can kick the crap out of them!

I used to think "Bobos in Paradise" was the new "Preppy handbook," but upper middle class people are so self-absorbed, nobody seemed to understand that it was making fun of them. With Stuff White People Like you can't avoid noticing that they're laughing at you, not with you. They're still managing to avoid the fact that the mockery is aimed at their silly social striving rather than their race, but that makes the spectacle of those soulless dimwits even more funny.


"One of the funny things about this Norman Rockwell painting is everyone in it makes tons of money and thinks of themselves as oppressed and sensitive to the agonies of the world. I bet her child excretes perfectly spherical pellets."