I was inclined to pick up this book based on Karen Healey’s quick review on her LiveJournal (you’ll have to scroll down to find it in the list):

It’s about the difficulty of hope, how terrible things happen for no reason, how the mechanics of poverty and oppression keep great people down, how they can be combated, and how faith – of many kinds, including in one’s God, in one’s self, and in one’s friends and allies – can be maintained, lost, regained, and blaze like a beacon for others. There’s barely any hints of romance.

Unfortunately, for me, it’s told in 1st person point-of-view, and i’ve found that with 1st person you have to actually like the narrator’s voice well enough to keep on.  And i didn’t.  Perhaps if i’d pressed on i’d have gotten past Amber’s irritating narrative stylings, but these days i don’t waste more time on a book than i have to.  Sorry, book!

Because you have no right to judge that another human is trash.

The New York Times story “Militia Charged With Plotting to Murder Officers” (29 march 2010), about the arrest of individuals involved in a radical Christian militia group in rural Michigan, included the following gem at the bottom of the article:

By Monday, the Stones’ house stood empty, its front door ajar and two dogs still tied up in the muddy yard, which was littered with dilapidated furniture, a washing machine and tires.

Thanks for that, New York Times.  That truly was, without a doubt, utterly integral to the rest of the article.  Assholes.

Some interesting posts this week on class here in the Pugetopolis.

A short class about ‘class’.  Dick Morrill, an emeritus professor of geography at the University of Washington and an expert in urban demography, attempts to map out the class structures of the Puget Sound region.  Except he starts out with this assertion in the 2nd paragraph:

There is no implication of “better than.” Class simply reflects the mix of inheritance, education, biology, experience, discrimination, and life events that lead to variability in economic well-being.

I do not understand at all how this professor has come to the conclusion that class has “no implication of ‘better than’.”  It seems to me that implications of “better than” are the only way class works.

Here’s a response to Professor Morrill’s essay:  Definition of Class Depends on Your Classification, by Ric Hallock, blogging for the Kitsap Sun (newspaper for the Kitsap Peninsula).  This response was interesting to me for 2 reasons.

First, it bears all of the hallmarks of almost every discussion i’ve ever had about class:

• Objecting to the other person’s argument because they’ve mis-identified your particular class — “I take exception because he includes my humble spread as definitively lower class.” — tho’ it’s true that usually i see middle/upper-class people playing up the poor/lower-class backgrounds of their parents and grandparents.
• Making broad, stereotypical assumptions about the “rural fringe” — “There’s no doubt the KP has its fair share of backwoods trailers with blocked up 4×4s littering the yard [...].”  Oh, yes, how droll.  We also marry our cousins and have no front teeth.

Fortunately, second of all, the essay does rise above simply being a reiteration of worn-out, worthless class discussion stereotypes.  Most notably, Hallock writes:

Regardless of any potential egalitarian notions you may have about living in a classless society, the truth is humans have a long and storied history of class in our varied cultures that is impossible to deny. When you consider yourself “rich” or “poor” or somewhere in between, you have just categorized yourself into a class.

Kathryn Cramer says (as quoted, with KC’s permission, by raanve):

“What my referrer logs tell me is that most of you are college students, some at really good schools.”

Here’s my question: So what? Why does it matter that one’s conversational adversaries seem to be college students and at “really good schools”?

That statement is making an awful lot of assumptions about:
1) economic background (”really good”)
2) class background (”really good”)
3) educational/academic background (”college students” / “really good schools”)
4) age (”college students”)

And why does any of it matter to the conversation at hand? If i am a young person (younger than you?) who’s financially able (wealthier than you?) to attend what’s socially known as a “good school” (socially higher than you?), does that somehow take away my expectation of the basic right to privacy? If people fit, age/class/education-wise, the profile that referrer logs suggest, how does that profile invalidate what the people are saying about online privacy??

There might be something here to be said about how the internet is a potentially class-free space (setting aside the privilege of even being on the internet in the 1st place) upon which real-world class structures are being forcibly imposed for no good reason other than that it’s a convenient way to get your conversational adversary to shut up and think about something other than the discussion at hand.

I don’t know if i’m going to come right out and say that, however, because i’m still working on understanding what class is in the 1st place and how it affects people, society, discourse, et cetera. So, no, i’m not going to come right out and say it — but i am going to think about it for awhile.

What i will say is that it seems to me that smart, non-stupid people who otherwise privilege academic/scholarly discourse shouldn’t have to go rooting around in a person’s personal life to find a reason to discredit what that person has to say.

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This was originally posted @ my LiveJournal.

For your amusement, 2 class-related bingo games.

Will Shetterly bingo. By kadath. From which i’ve taken the center square as an icon.

Working class bingo. By carenejeans. Wow, i’ve heard many of those things in class discussions a depressing number of times.

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This was originally posted @ my LiveJournal.