A Quote by Timothy Noah
Is class snobbery a social reality in the United States? Absolutely, and the kind that's codified by meritocracy is probably more toxic than the old-fashioned kind based on bloodlines.
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All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let's get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States - and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!
Class is rarely talked about in the United States; nowhere is there a more intense silence about the reality of class differences than in educational settings.
The United States is a special case, and for me, very interesting. It's studied carefully and we know a lot about it. One of the most striking features of the elections is the class-based character of the vote. Now, class is not discussed or even measured in the United States. In fact, the word is almost obscene, except for the term "middle class." And you can't get exact class data; the census doesn't even give class data. But you can sort of see the significance of it just from income figures.
The stress laid on upward social mobility in the United States has tended to obscure the fact that there can be more than one kind of mobility and more than one direction in which it can go. There can be ethical mobility as well as financial, and it can go down as well as up.
The traveler to the United States will do wellto prepare himself for the class-consciousness of the natives. This differs from the already familiar English version in being more extreme and based more firmly on the conviction that the class to which the speaker belongs is inherently superior to all others.
The Germany I was enthused with was more old fashioned and kind of romantic. I just got there, and the next thing you know, I had this huge gilded album. It was kind of an amazing experience because I didn't intend it to be that way.
An old joke has an Oxford professor meeting an American former graduate student and asking him what he's working on these days. 'My thesis is on the survival of the class system in the United States.' 'Oh really, that's interesting: one didn't think there was a class system in the United States.' 'Nobody does. That's how it survives.
A kind of racism still exists in the United States, and Islamophobia is a more convenient way to express that sentiment. There has also been an attempt to paint Muslims as enemies of the United States.
There's a certain kind of insular, old-fashioned, upper-class Britishness that gives me the spooks. I am sure that comes from a boarding-school trauma.
'No Sweetness Here' is the kind of old-fashioned social realism I have always been drawn to in fiction, and it does what I think all good literature should: It entertains you.
In Britain, where the social safety net is more like a social swaddling cloth, crime rates other than murder are significantly higher than in the United States.
I don't believe in simulationism, I believe that the word is already old-fashioned. As I see it, new technologies are substituting a virtual reality for an actual reality. And this is more than a phase: it's a definite change.
I'm actually genuinely optimistic about the United States and what's possible in the United States. And when you're out here, you see Americans across racial and economic and socioeconomic lines working together. And you maybe get a little bit less cynical than when you sit in the seat of kind of the epicenter of it all.
The Constitution of the United States. It's still the best document of its kind, and written into it are exactly the kind of protections that ensure that no person or group of persons, no matter how diabolical or insane, can hijack the country for much longer than a decade.
Money and one of its embodiments, social class, are both riveting and mysterious to children. And if we don't challenge today's stigma around class status, it will warp a new generation's experience of an even more important class - the kind in which they learn. And that's one thing we simply can't afford.
Most of arts what comes from the States to Europe has something to do with entertainment. I can't imagine artists in the United States having the same kind of isolated position that we have here in Europe. I have a feeling one lives more publically in the States.
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