THE DISCREET ANXIETY OF THE BOURGEOISIE - Fear of Falling

THE DISCREET ANXIETY OF THE BOURGEOISIE - New York Times:

'via Blog this'

(Read "Fear of Falling." Great book.) 



"The latter, Ms. Ehrenreich says, was especially important. ''If theories of the 'culture of poverty' were the middle-class critique of the poor, rock was a critique of the middle class, bubbling up from America's invisible 'others.' '' Rock, she notes, was the music of the underclass, and by the late 1960's its influence extended literally everywhere in America." 

(Thank God.)

"Ms. Ehrenreich, an intellectual journalist with a gift for aphorism and the author of several books, picks up her story of middle-class anxiety in the late 1950's. At the time, it was claimed there was no need for a major political restructuring of society, although divisions of class and race remained powerful elements in American life. Frequently, conflicts were dealt with euphemistically. Affluence, Ms. Ehrenreich notes, became ''a way of talking about wealth without talking about class.''

A larger problem was ''discovered'' in the early 1960's: poverty. After millions of Americans were revealed to be impoverished, a number of leading sociologists, together with a spate of cover stories in the news weeklies, blamed the condition not on class but on a lack of character, deficient morals among the poor. This explanation, Ms. Ehrenreich observes, served as a kind of psychological projection. The poor represented ''what the middle class feared most in itself,'' she says - a ''softening of character, a lack of firm internal values.''"