What Happened....

[Fading Fast]

Which, as I say, is fine. It's their culture. It's not ours. Some enjoy eating fried insects. It's their culture. It's not ours.

Our culture is to buy live marine arthropods off the side of a boat, take them home alive, and them boil them to death in our kitchens, after which we rip them apart with our bare hands, with no utensils and no "presentation", sucking the flesh out of their bodies as we go. Or we go down the shore with a hoe and a basket and dig clams out of the stinky, sulphurous mud, take them home, and steam them to death in a big kettle, dunk their corpses in butter, bite off the siphon and gulp down the rest. And then we throw the shells out behind the house in a pile. That's our culture. I won't try to convince anyone who objects that it's really great and they ought to try it because I have no need to force my culture onto anyone else's.

I get that and respect it. What surprised me is that I doubt sushi has always been a part of NYC construction worker culture, but somehow, they've discovered and embraced it. More broadly, several not "look at us" cultures, at least in NYC, seem to have embraced it. Just not what I thought would happen twenty plus years ago when I assumed it would fade once the fad wore off and the in-the-know people moved on. Last thought, if the in-the-know people look down on someone 'cause they don't like it, who cares, the only power the in-the-know people have over me is if I care about their opinions and I don't.

 

[ChiTownScion]

I first got into sushi and other Japanese food back in '74. One of those "friend of a friend" situations. He was/ is heavily into Japanese culture and got me started on it. There was certainly nothing "trendy" about it at the time: I just acquired a taste for it. It also appealed to me because it seemed healthy, one of the few really healthy things I enjoyed eating.

But I get the part about the trend conscious passing judgment on others who "just don't get it." People try to tweak pizza all of the time. And while I'm good with either New York or Chicago (thin crust: not that touristy "deep dish" stuff) style pizza, I draw the line at "California Pizza" type aberrations. I'd never question another man's personal pizza tastes.. that's like getting into an argument over who's religion is best. But suggesting that I "need" to try some mutation de jour.... that's just going too far.

 

[ChiTownScion]

I have no objection to anyone who enjoys it. What I do object to is the supercilious look down the nose often directed at those of us who find the idea of raw fish revolting, along with the "awww, you don't know what you're missing."

The sight of any cooked cereal does that to me. ANY of it. Oatmeal, cream of wheat, grits.. you name it. It's a reflex and I can't control it if someone eats it too close to me. And the "you don't know what you're missing" comments likewise arise when I express my distaste.

If your touristas are bent out of shape by your fish bait comments, imagine the reactions to my "barf in a bowl" remarks!

 

[LizzieMaine]

I'm also that way about chewing gum. When I have to clean it off seats with Carbona and a putty knife, I have to hold a wet washcloth over my face to keep from vomiting. It's all I can do not to visibly retch when I see someone masticating their cud.

The constant "foodiefication" of working class food really gets on my nerves. All these places in town that cook lobsters in wine or steam clams in weird exotic broths or whatever -- that's taking something simple and homey, and tarting it up to the point of ridiculousnessness, like sending your grandmother out in six-inch-heels, fishnet stockings, and a drag-queen wig. Twelve-dollar toasted-cheese-sandwich vendors, please copy. We're not all chumps here.

 

[EngProf]

It's all a matter of taste, so no offense is intended, but to me raw fish is what you eat after you have escaped from a POW camp and are staggering through the jungle starving to death and manage to grab a fish out of a mud-puddle. Other than that, all food should be thoroughly cooked.
And also with no offense intended to LizzieM and other coastal dwellers, for someone born and raised in the middle-part of the country, eating giant roaches (lobsters) has NO appeal.
Until we run completely out of steak, cheeseburgers, barbecue(!), pork chops, fried chicken, and (well-cooked) fish, none of those will be eaten by me.
(I'm not saying that you shouldn't eat raw fish and lobsters, they are just not for me...)

 

[Stearmen]

I have no objection to anyone who enjoys it. What I do object to is the supercilious look down the nose often directed at those of us who find the idea of raw fish revolting, along with the "awww, you don't know what you're missing." In our culture, fish is fried or broiled or grilled or poached in condensed milk or eaten on toast with mustard sauce. We're not Japanese, we're not gourmands, and we're not foodies. We're people who grew up beside the ocean and we eat fish the way we've always eaten it, and we don't need lessons from fromaways.

 

[HudsonHawk]

I'm sure some are - as Lizzie implies - playing some food-superiority game (which I don't really understand), but I have to concede, despite how horrifying it is to me to even contemplate, people genuinely enjoy sushi. This would probably be the 10,000 thing I was wrong about when I was younger.

I like to turn the food snobbery around. If you don't like collard greens and cornbread, or grits with butter and black pepper, you're just an uncircumcised Philistine who ought not be allowed to darken the doors of our hallowed establishments. Go eat your raw fish and tofu salad while reading the scrawling on the insides of your caves.

 

[Joe50's]

this redneck meme sums up how i feel when relatives try to sell me on sushi ill take my grandmas southern fried fish on grits with collard greens over sushi any day.

I like to turn the food snobbery around. If you don't like collard greens and cornbread, or grits with butter and black pepper, you're just an uncircumcised Philistine who ought not be allowed to darken the doors of our hallowed establishments. Go eat your raw fish and tofu salad while reading the scrawling on the insides of your caves.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I like to turn the food snobbery around. If you don't like collard greens and cornbread, or grits with butter and black pepper, you're just an uncircumcised Philistine who ought not be allowed to darken the doors of our hallowed establishments. Go eat your raw fish and tofu salad while reading the scrawling on the insides of your caves.

I'll see your collard greens and grits, and raise you dandelion greens and Wheatena.

 

[BlueTrain]

Anyone for wilted lettuce and extra sweet iced tea?

Well, here's a twist on the situation from a different perspective. I'm from a small town and none of my relatives were born there except those of my age. They all moved there from the country because that's where the jobs were--then. People, like me, are moving away now. The main industry moved away, mainly as the result of a corporate merger in the railroad business. The railroads have struggled over the decades since WWII with competition from the trucking industry as well as private automobiles and airlines. These days, I live in the suburbs. There is no town per se within ten miles to suffer gentrification, but I know of all the places that have.

Here, people go on about suburban sprawl, which is real, but still not that bad of a problem. The funny thing is, people will complain just as much if someone wants to build on an empty lot in town (the city, that is). That's called "in-filling." So basically, you can't win. Money will win every time.

My wife's parents moved to a waterfront community as soon as my wife's father retired (still in his 50s). It didn't take long before he started complaining about other people moving there with their big city rules. The local people call them "come-here's." I do understand the phenomenon of well-off people moving to a quaint seaside village and transforming it. However, they do in fact form a community, I believe. The thing is, the locals won't be part of that community, except perhaps for the lawyers and real estate people. In fact, I think that in the larger world, "community" is a layered thing. You don't really associate with everyone or just anyone. You only associate with those on your on level. To say your own "class" sounds awful but that's pretty much what it amounts to. Some people have no class but that's a different story.

By the way, we have no trouble at all getting people to do plumbing, roofing, yard work, tree work, remodeling, the works. And in another few months, we'll have a string of people knocking on the door wanting to know if we want any far wood.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Which all comes back to the basic point -- America is not, and was never, a "classless society." The idea that it is is a myth, used to justify all manner of economic oppression and cultural erasure over the past few centuries. Social class is a very real factor in all our dealings with each other and with the larger society in which we live, even if we want to pretend that it isn't because we desperately want to believe in the myth of a "classless society."

When you realize this, you can't ever un-realize it. You also realize how class insecurity is the single most significant motivation in the lives of most Americans -- it's usually not *conscious,* but it's the most important factor driving the common "get ahead" mentality. "Get ahead" -- of whom? The only classes truly immune to this are the genuine hereditary upper class -- the American Aristocracy, which has no need to aspire, and the lowest ranks of the proletariat, which has long since lost all hope of ever "getting ahead."

And this insecurity also drives all of the prole-bashing that's most common among the lower middle class -- the "People Of WalMart" websites, the online screeds about "pants sagging gangsta wannabees," the pearl-twisting complaints about the decline of "traditional manners," and even the phenomenon of sixty-somethings going around wearing college sweatshirts so there can be no doubt that all onlookers know where they went to school. All that stems from wanting to believe in a classless society -- "it's their own fault Those People are like that, they could better themselves if they wanted to" -- but knowing, deep down, that this isn't one, and to the belief, inculcated to much profit by the psychological manipulators in service to the Boys, that if they're not careful even the most aspirational middle-class person will fall back into the desperate ranks of the proles.

And to go full-circle back to hats, well, what are all the rituals of "hat etiquette" but a public demonstration that the practitioner of such rituals is "well bred," i. e. a way of publicly demonstrating class status. "I am not like that prole in the greasy baseball cap because I touch the brim of my hat when I pass a person of equivalent or higher social status on the street."

 

[BlueTrain]

Hats? Huh--oh, yeah. Well, anyhow, what you say is entirely correct, mostly, but I suspect that's it's even more complicated than that. And it changes and it's not quite the same everywhere but close enough so that people understand what you're talking about, except for those who haven't given up hope yet, usually immigrants. In a lot of cases, they, the immigrants, are escaping some form of class structure of various degrees of rigidity and may not quite understand things here. So, in a way of speaking, they don't have the same baggage. All of the family doctors and dentists are immigrants, for example.

I also think that to some extent, people lower down on the social scale are largely invisible to those in loftier circumstances. Oh, they realize there are those who drive old cars, don't dress very well and have bad teeth but those who are well off essentially have no idea how the other 90% live unless they've been there and most haven't.

 

[HudsonHawk]

And to go full-circle back to hats, well, what are all the rituals of "hat etiquette" but a public demonstration that the practitioner of such rituals is "well bred," i. e. a way of publicly demonstrating class status. "I am not like that prole in the greasy baseball cap because I touch the brim of my hat when I pass a person of equivalent or higher social status on the street."

But manners aren't something one does to signify social status, at least it wasn't where I grew up. Even if you were a bum off the street you knew not to put your elbows on the table, to say "please" and "thank you" and to take your hat off when you walked into someone's home. This doesn't require money, only respect for others and the realization that the world doesn't revolve around you.

 

[LizzieMaine]

In the Era, would a middle-class white man, anywhere in the United States, have tipped his hat to a scrubwoman pulling a load of laundry as he passed her in the street? Or to any African-American woman?

I'm talking about ritualized manners -- the Emily Post stuff. I don't see any way in which ritualizing which fork to use shows consideration for others. If anything, it's inconsiderate to the person who's going to have to wash all those extra forks.

I'll also admit that I have never understood how keeping your elbows off the table shows consideration for others. I always put my elbows on the table as a kid because it helped me reach my plate. It was either that or sit on a couple of Sears catalogs. And to this day I put my elbows on the desk while eating at work, because it keeps me close enough that the crumbs don't fall in my keyboard.

I think that a real consideration for others involves the host ensuring that the most lowly of his guests is in no way made to feel uncomfortable. I like the story of the prole -- let's call him Victor McLaglen -- who was, for whatever reason, invited to a meal at the home of the local aristocrat. He had no idea what a finger bowl was, never having heard of such, so when it came around he picked it up and drank the water. All the C. Aubrey Smiths and Margaret Dumonts at the table gasped in horror at this social gaffe. But the host -- whom we'll call George Arliss -- simply picked up his own finger bowl and calmly drank it down.

*That* is consideration for others.

I think "please and thank you," meanwhile, have become so ritualized as to become essentially meaningless -- it's something you say because you're supposed to, not because you actually intend them as a show of respect or gratitude. "Please" is actually a word that comes from the ritualized interaction between a vassal and a noble -- it's simply a contraction of "if it may please your honor/grace/majesty whatever, grant my request for thus and so." But when somebody says "Please unstop the toilet" are they making a humble request acknowledging that it may impose on the person of whom they're making the request, or are they simply giving an order couched in gentle, or even passive-aggressive language? There are times when "please" is one of the most hostile words in the language. And "thank you," a phrase I hear and say myself dozens of times a day, is nowadays usually just a convenient way of saying "this transaction is over" rather than being a sincere expression of gratitude for a favor or a service rendered. And it too can be passive-aggressive or even hostile.

I'm not trying to dismiss such courtesies out of hand -- they do have their place. But I think it's also worthwhile to recognize, as fodder for discussion, that even they do in fact have origins in inter-class relationships.

 

[Fading Fast]

Maybe it's the word manners as some are what HH talks about - IMHO, things that are part of just being polite to others - and some are what Lizzie talks about - knowing which fork to use - which are more like social customs, niceties, etc. The first were drilled into me and the second, my parent only knew some, so they could only pass some along.

My parents taught me to say please, thank you, hold a door open, etc. to anyone - race, religion, color never - sincerely - never came up in the this context. And they led by example - my parents were polite to everyone, showed the same manners to everyone and expected me to do the same.

That's why I agree with HH that some of this stuff was not about class, but was about interacting in a nice, respectful way. I specifically remember being taught to say hello to everyone, say thank you if they did anything for you, say excuse me if you got in their way, etc. and that applied to everyone - it wasn't ever discussed as "this also applies to the ..." My dad was a small business owner and I saw him give the same hello to the garbage man, the policeman, the neighbor who worked in the bank, the car salesman, etc. I believe deeply that to him, that was just about being nice and polite.

But I do understand Lizzie's point as there are many cultural customs - that are called manners - that are used by some to signal class distinctions.

And as to elbows on the table, IMHO, this is one that falls in between the above two categories. We were taught not to put them on the table because, well, everyone we knew also kept them off the table. We weren't taught it in a "our people don't" way (I can't tell you how insane the idea of one of my parents ever saying "our people don't" is). And we were always taught to never, ever comment on someone else's manner. If they put their elbows on the table - so be it - don't judge.

My Dad was not an easy man, but looking back, I think his abject poverty depression upbringing gave him a great outlook on what mattered and what didn't. It mattered greatly to be polite to everyone. As to manners, sure, learn the basics, don't judge others who might not have learned them and move on with life.

 

[LizzieMaine]

And as to elbows on the table, IMHO, this is one that falls in between the above two categories. We were taught not to put them on the table because, well, everyone we knew also kept them off the table

And that's what I mean by it being a social marker. It doesn't mean that you looked down your nose at those who did otherwise -- but you did do it to express your membership in a certain class made up of "everyone we knew."

In our circles I think we defined traditional "politeness" more as something that was extended to people *outside* our social group -- it expressed a certain remoteness that we maintained with outsiders, which said, "Hello, you're not from here and you're not one of us, but we acknowledge your presence." That's a distinctly Northern New England working-class cultural thing which outsiders might interpret as a certain brusqueness, but it's simply the way we are.

We never called the parents of our friends Mr. or Mrs. -- they were always "Marvin" and "Fern" and "Denny" and "Judy" and "Danny" and "Carol," no matter how old they were or how young we were. We didn't think anything of walking into our friends' houses without knocking, or staying for lunch without asking permission, and our friends acted the same way toward us. And parents had no qualms about yelling at other peoples' kids when they were doing something stupid or dangerous, and nobody said "please" or "thank you" unless someone had really gone out of their way to do something for you. I don't want to use the phrase "class solidarity" in this sense, because that's not really what it was. It was more a sense that we were a sort of an extended family in our neighborhood -- we didn't always like each other, and often fought and argued and cursed each other, but it was the way a family does, if you get what I'm saying.

There was an egalitarianism in our relationships with each other which I think deep down *was* class based, that made any kind of ritual courtesies unnecessary. In fact, to use them with each other was very much an insult -- it was the same as saying "you're not one of us." If ever one of the kids at work called me "Mrs." or "Ms." or responded with "yes ma'am," I'd think she was being snide and disrespectful and I'd reprimand her for it.

 

[Fading Fast]

^^^ That all makes sense to me. When I got to high school, my school shared a bus with the Catholic high school, so I became friendly with several Irish Catholic kids (that's how we referred to them without rancor) and their houses and neighborhoods remind me of what you describe in your post. Kids ran in and out of the different houses (half of them seemed to be cousins with the other half anyway) - which were never locked - you ate at the house you were at and it wasn't a big deal or even "a deal," and everyone watched over everyone's kids because no one could keep an eye on all their kids anyway.

Also, in your post, a big key, at least in my world growing up, was this:

And that's what I mean by it being a social marker. It doesn't mean that you looked down your nose at those who did otherwise -- but you did do it to express your membership in a certain class made up of "everyone we knew."...

I never felt as a kid that we did stuff like "elbows off the table" to look down or even to distinguish our "class," but I get that it does the later, but I know - and if you knew my parents, you'd get it - it wasn't done to look down on anyone.

 

[LizzieMaine]

And the next thing beyond that is to note that you had to prove you were "one of us" before you could enjoy that level of acceptance. The new family moving into the neighborhood was not given the "welcome wagon" treatment -- they had to show they weren't here to try and impose their culture on us, especially if they were moving here from outastate. A common way to test a newcomer was to offer them a Moxie -- if they exclaimed in an overenthusiastic way how much they liked it, they weren't one of us and never would be. If they spat it out and said it was disgusting, they weren't yet, but might be eventually. Blunt honesty is respected here, smiling courteous insincerity is despised. And If they simply drank it in a matter-of-fact way, they were in, with no further tests needed.

All social classes have their shibboleths, their rituals, and their ways of differentiating Us from Them. The Lounge itself is a living textbook full of examples of this, as any perusal of the hat, suit, or leather jacket threads will demonstrate.

 

[ChiTownScion]

The constant "foodiefication" of working class food really gets on my nerves.

My only gripe about the whole foodie mindset is the willingness to pay beaucoup bucks for tiny servings in huge plates. Presentation is a nice feature, but it doesn't come close to that sense of satisfaction after a truly gut- busting meal. Not EVERY meal: that's why it's a special occasion. But that sated, all- is- right- with- the- world nirvana glow that no meal is "great" without. You don't get that with miniscule portions. I'm not Polish but for some reason, a heaping plate of pierogis with kielbasa and sauerkraut fills that bill like no other option.

 

[ChiTownScion]

All social classes have their shibboleths, their rituals, and their ways of differentiating Us from Them. The Lounge itself is a living textbook full of examples of this, as any perusal of the hat, suit, or leather jacket threads will demonstrate.

My theory on that: the bigger world has deemed us as odd birds for enjoying such things as a classic suit, a bespoke hat, or a nice leather jacket. We become an "us" because so many have deemed us to be a "them." A little like your theatre kids singing the Hut Sut Song:* we can either hide it or we can flaunt it. Flaunting it is a lot more fun, and if it encourages the like minded to join in, all the better.

*I am sure that my dad is looking down and chuckling at the sight of Post-millennial kids singing it.