In Praise of Class

The reason why wealthy people prefer to hire Third World nannies and gardeners has very little to do with money. Sure, they don’t actually like to pay things like insurance, Social Security, disability, etc., but that’s not the whole point. The point is that Third Worlders and people who don’t speak English well know their place.

In our “classless society” ordinary people don’t. It gets awkward.

With a language barrier, one is not “friends” with The Help.

Marriage also, by the way, once benefited from class.

The idea of having one’s outcomes pretty well guaranteed by The Master and Mistress is not such a bad thing. Depending on Government to guarantee one’s outcomes leads to dissatisfaction and all matter of Government dystopia.

It is also not such a bad deal for women to surrender their agency to The Patriarchy in exchange for State-guaranteed outcomes.

For whatever it’s worth, I have no idea of what is my own true “class”. Supposedly, in my parents’ and grandparents’ day “Education” trumped all. I suspect that this idea was borne out of The Great Depression such that observing the misery of the farmers losing pretty well everything was enough to make those who presumed to be of a class above the farmers to not in any way—no how—be farmers. Even if they were.

Supposedly, “Education” insulated oneself from being starved and degraded, with the hereditary estate surrendered to The Banks. No wonder no one wanted to have “class” anymore.

The myth that farmers are somehow illiterate and poorly educated also sprang out of that era, in my opinion. After all, back in the days of the original U.S. Colonies, according to John Taylor Gatto, farmers had vocabularies that would put the average tenured academic of today to shame.

During The Winter, while the livestock rests in straw-fermentation-manure-heated barns, there’s not a lot to do. Reading books of more challenging bent than today’s pulp was the norm. Children were educated and apprenticed into useful activity. There was no such thing as “adolescence.” Not such a bad life, by my reckoning.

However, homesteading is not for everyone. Sometimes people starved or were stormed by savages. Outcomes were not guaranteed by The State. Oh well. That’s where God comes in.

At least one branch of my family tree were indentured servants. That could easily be a miserable life. However, one of the inducements of The Revolutionary War, which that particular bastard son of a Scottish Earl, and two other ancestors (Scotch-Irish, Pennsylvania Dutch, Huguenot, English, French, German, etc.), partook in, was the sense of “gentry” that exceeded the immigrants which came later. Investing by means of risking one’s life as a new arrival in a new nation has benefits.

However, servitude, where one’s outcomes are guaranteed by the prosperity of The Master or Mistress is not necessarily such a bad life. If that is one that one is cut out to be. Not everyone can be the boss, and who really wants to be? Naturally, not all bosses are equal, but wise ones realize that investment over time involves shared outcomes.

Again, not really knowing my class but having more than one “educator” in the family tree, back when “educators” were sort of like “snake oil salesmen” in terms of their trustworthy factor, I intuit based on conversations that it was extremely important for my Depression Era grandparents to represent themselves as “educated”.

However, they were evenly divided between “the industrious” and “the grande dame”. I suspect that some of that last was then, as now, sort of a consumerist/celebrity/media driven/Feminist hybrid.

When I was a child, the “Southern” grandparents had a Black maid. We all called her by her first name; however, she never became overly familiar with any of us. I suspected that she liked it that way. That way, she could go home to her real life after work.

Many years later, I spent some time with those grandparents at their newer (before I was born) “Yankee” digs in Long Island. They had a new Black maid but were unhappy with her chosen name as not being dignified enough. She introduced herself to me as “Sammy” or something, while my grandmother corrected her with, “Samantha is so much nicer.”

I was not very close to this dirtfarmer-cum-educator-cum-putting on Yankee “educated” airs side of the family.

“Did you really have to rename her, grandmother?”

For what it’s worth, the best four years of my life were spent as the servant of Axel. It was not a lofty existence living in a flat in North Philadelphia then in a fifth wheel in Long Beach, California. My job was to rise before him and have his lunch, breakfast, thermoses, handrolled cigarettes, and ironed shirts ready. When he would order me to do something—anything—I would jump to fulfill it. When he came home, dinner was at least at the planning stage and was on time, kept warm, or ready to serve at 6:00 PM every day.

I also cleaned the place, shopped, laundry, did some computer work for him, or really anything he wanted. There was nothing that was beneath me. Far from it. Pleasing him was my whole life.

As a skilled craftsman/tradesman he outclassed me. Being of service to him was an honor.

I think that it is just media and consumerism which tells women that this job is somehow degrading.

It is an affront to Feminists.

I hate Feminists/Socialists who would put the responsibility of all outcomes in the hands of government.

It is not demeaning to separate oneself from the outcome-guaranteeing class.

Sometimes life happens though and here I am, without Axel, at the mercy of those who could not care less about me.

And so I speak my mind.