Clancy and I are both very fortunate in that we really like our in-laws and our in-laws like us and one another. For Thanksgiving, two years in a row our parents came up to Estacado to visit us for the holiday. Her father has no sons and no American sons-in-law and little in the way of nephews, so I occupy more of a sonly position than is commonly the case with fathers-in-law. My mother, upon meeting Clancy, pulled me aside and said “Hold on to that girl, hold on to that girl, hold on to that girl!” (an enthusiasm she never had for Julie or Evangeline). Even our extended families get along quite well.
A lot of it can be traced to our similarities of values. The upper-middle class sort of values Sheila would say make us decided un-prole. Further, despite coming from well-off families we also come from parents that did not grow up nearly as well off so there’s not the sense of invulnerability that a lot of well-off people have.
So I enjoy spending time with her family and she enjoys spending time with mine. What we’ve sort of discovered over the last couple weeks is that this goodwill has limits. We each tire of our own parents, but we tire of one another’s a little bit faster.
I think as much as anything it comes down to shared history. I can spend a lot of time with my family because it takes a lot longer to run out of things to talk about. We can reminisce about old times. Mom can fill me in on how various people I know are doing. Our stories about how things are going are made that much funnier and more interesting by intricacies of our personalities that our spouses and in-laws may know but haven’t fully experiences and can’t fully appreciate.
And when the conversation stops, the awkwardness can begin. There’s nothing explicit about the awkwardness. No one is made to feel bad about about anything. There is the odd sense, though, of knowing that you’re fortunate to be able to get to spend time with these people that you don’t get to see often. So you feel the need to try to make the most of it.
I don’t get nearly as much time around my father-in-law as I would prefer. There are all sorts of times where I want to ask him questions or tell him about something extraordinary that happened at work that I know he will be able to appreciate, but I don’t get the chance to. Neither he nor I are really phone people and we haven’t found the calling-up-father-in-law dynamic like the weekly jam session I have with my parents.
Then this week came around and I plum ran out of things to talk about. There were various things that I could tell him, but the pressure to be entertaining is different if you’re sharing something that happened last week and something else that happened last month. I saw him twice in recent months and may see him again if he comes up to Cascadia to help us move. I am going to have to reload my conversational rifle in preparation.
What exactly do you mean by “prole”? I’ve seen it mentioned here a couple of times, and I started reading Half Sigma and it’s mentioned there too - both places in a fairly snooty sense, it seems.
I’m going to assume it’s short for “proletariat” but I’m not getting the reference.
Comment by Barry — January 20, 2010 @ 2:56 pm
Why not just enjoy each other’s company without having to talk for the sake of talking? Sit in the same room and read, watch a ball game, work on your laptop, etc. Enjoy their company while they are still around.
Now that I know you are a novelist of sorts, your blog posts make more sense to me. You have a novelist’s eye for minutia. I guess one key to being a good novelist is to sort the key details from the rest of the minutia and keep only those.
“What exactly do you mean by “prole”?”
Barry, they use it as a synonym for “low-class”, but it’s a pointless and flawed adjective for reasons I’ve mentioned elsewhere. One reason is that there are many folks in “proletarian” lines of work who are educated and earn more than folks such as Half Sigma who look down on “proles”.
Comment by DaveinHackensack — January 20, 2010 @ 4:10 pm
Barry,
Sigma defines prole here. Sheila actually had a quiz on the matter.
I would actually say that it’s a designation for someone on the lower end of the social classes. It correlates with economic status, though not absolutely. But it’s basically someone that is relatively uncultured, intellectually incurious, and uninterested or incapable of moving up the social ladder.
I would actually label it more a tendency than an identity. It’s an inexact sort of thing. But it’s basically a collection of behaviors and behavior patterns that commonly group together.
Oh, and I wanted to thank you for your thoughtful comment on the Barry Cooper post. I meant to reply to it but it fell through the cracks.
Comment by trumwill — January 20, 2010 @ 4:24 pm
Dave,
I do that, too, but that’s not what we flew over 2k miles to do. There is a sort of need to try to get in all the conversation that you can.
Comment by trumwill — January 20, 2010 @ 4:25 pm
One sign of non-proleness: Your folks talk to you about subjects besides bad stuff other relatives are doing.
Comment by stone — January 20, 2010 @ 6:40 pm
“Barry, they use it as a synonym for “low-class”, but it’s a pointless and flawed adjective for reasons I’ve mentioned elsewhere. One reason is that there are many folks in “proletarian” lines of work who are educated and earn more than folks such as Half Sigma who look down on “proles”. ”
Sack, don’t try to Garfinkle away a very valid drawing line between people who tend to engage in certain behaviors you would probably consider undesirable. I think you miss, perhaps deliberately, a lot of the finer points. BTW, HS grew up as a gifted Jew in Staten Island, which is apparently a Guido paradise. So those sorts of distinctions would naturally matter more to someone like him than someone from a society where such behaviors were automatically screened out.
Comment by stone — January 20, 2010 @ 6:44 pm
It always struck me how much time Julianne’s family spent badmouthing one another. Particularly the temper tantrum when her father remarried. That sort of thing really wasn’t allowed in our family, at least on my father’s side. The closest we ever got was when my great aunt married a Unitarian and then it was more concern than condemnation. Ditto for the cousin who married a girl he wrote to in prison.
Mom’s family is a bit of a different story. But the solution there was still silence, in a way, as when my mother and aunt didn’t speak for a 15 year stretch.
From a financial perspective, though, my mother’s family was always better off than my father’s. We had my famous great2-grandfather who passed some money down. My great2-grandmother was kind of… selective… about who she sent it to. But even folks that didn’t have much money (Mom’s branch lost out there) were still raised to fit in with those that did.
Dad’s family was always quite poor until his generation half-busted out to varying degrees. All four of them were college educated, though. Dad became a military economist, one aunt a teacher and fireman’s wife, one a co-entreprenuer with her second husband, and my uncle an insurance investigator).
Comment by trumwill — January 20, 2010 @ 8:03 pm
“Sack, don’t try to Garfinkle away a very valid drawing line between people who tend to engage in certain behaviors you would probably consider undesirable.”
“Garfinkle” is a new verb for me. I assume it’s a reference to the cartoon cat. Are you using it in the same sense the Smurfs used “smurf” as a verb?
Certain behaviors I consider undesirable are the carping and wallowing you and Siggy engage in. That doesn’t make you two “prole” in my mind though.
I suspect I have had close contact with broader swathes of people than you or Siggy has, broad enough so that I see how porous are the demarcations you two are trying to make. I’ve mentioned some examples here before, I think: the guy who struggled in high school and is now a hugely successful real estate developer; his father, a close friend of my parents who slept on our couch when he was broke but, late in life, became a successful businessman and inventor in a niche I would never have thought of.
Another example could be my mother, for that matter. Her grandfather was a pushcart merchant (”prole”, I assume, in your and Siggy’s view) who lucked into an apprenticeship to a cabinet maker (”prole”) and then built a successful office furniture manufacturing company (still “prole”?). My mother was in a hunt club or retriever club, or whatever it’s called when she was young (not “prole”, I assume?). Then she ended up marrying a social worker (”prole!”), worked as a waitress for a while when he got laid off (he worked as a maitre d’ at the same place) (”prole!”), got a fireman license (Can you get more “prole” than that?) for a superintendent of buildings & grounds job in the HQ of our local school system. Then got the same job at Columbia University (”prole?”). She bought me a paperback of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris when she worked there, because Columbia students she knew recommended it (not “prole”?). She read A.E. Houseman poetry to me when I was a kid (not “prole”?). Now she works 12 hours a day (”prole?”) on her own small farm (”prole”?) and watches PBR (”prole!”) on RFD-TV (”prole!!”).
I’ve rubbed shoulders with rich and poor, blue collar and white, and found decent people and dicks — and thoughtful folks and incurious ones — at all levels. I think there was a time, a few generations ago, when class was more strongly correlated with money: the wealthy usually had class, and a sense of noblesse oblige to boot. It doesn’t correlate like that anymore. True class is rare at any socioeconomic level.
Comment by DaveinHackensack — January 21, 2010 @ 1:24 am
Dave,
That there are exceptions does not disprove the rule. Would you expect there to be a different social atmosphere in a warehouse working environment versus an engineering one? Does that difference magically dissipate if I can point to a couple of guys in the shop that read Kant and Plato and a couple guys in the office that enjoy WWF? There are still patterns of behavior. stereotypes that people live up to or defy.
Just because you were raised in a prole environment or were a prole yourself doesn’t mean that it is your destiny to remain that way. That my friend crossed does not render the fact that he was one of the few that did irrelevent.
Most of Julianne’s friends stayed in the blue-collar suburb in which they were raised. Some went to college, but comparatively few made it through. Some, like Julie, succeeded anyway. She made more money this year than either Clancy or I did (or would have if our contracts hadn’t expired)… but there’s still a cultural disconnect.
She’s good people. Her folks were good people. Her brother is good people. I happen to think my family is good people to. We’re not snobs. They’re not classless. Yet, when my parents met her parents… finding common ground was a struggle. I liked her parents and they liked me. Yet, when we lost the one big thing that we had in common (our connection to Julie)… we never really spoke again.
Comment by trumwill — January 21, 2010 @ 2:09 am
Part of the awkwardness we can feel around family members, as adults, once the shared experience and reminiscing runs out is that these people are not necessarily the ones you would select as friends were you not related. So even though you are related to your aunt or your cousin or even your mom and dad (or in-laws, by marriage) and can spend hours talking about the people you knew in high school, and their parents, and the latest construction project in the old home town, etc, there may be little reason or enjoyment in discussing politics or business or “LOST” or “Avatar” or college football or any other topic not related to, well, relations. We don’t pick our family, it picks us and you can’t force friendships. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be cordial and try to find common ground as often as possible - it makes things easier. But by the same token we shouldn’t be disappointed or feel like there’s something deficient in a relationship with a relative if, after a few hours of catching up, there’s nothing left to talk about.
I’ve never had that feeling with my parents (or in-laws, luckily) because we all live in the same city and keep in touch in little increments, as well as see each other, all the time. But our extended families we see at Christmas and Thanksgiving for a couple of days at a time, and after that believe me, that’s enough.
Comment by Barry — January 21, 2010 @ 6:48 am
Interesting. I’m glad I brought up the question of what is a “prole”. I had a suspicion that’s what it meant, from context, but it’s enlightening to know for sure.
Coming as an n-th generation Tennesseean, I can see people’s disdain and ill-disguised pity for “proles” in the same way most Northerners perceive Southerners - no, most don’t believe we’re all barefoot, moonshine-toting, gun-running good-ole-boys anymore but that general looking down the noses at people who grow up many miles from the nearest 50-story building and concrete jungle. To Northerners, you can take the Southerner out of the farm but you can’t take the farm out the Southerner. Or worse, the plantation for other reasons.
But you know, we’re proud of our agricultural heritage. As one who wouldn’t know what to do on a farm if my life depended on it, I have a number of ancestors that certainly did and most of the people I know that grew up around here did as well. And it gave our culture character, and an interdependency and reliance on family that few Northerners realize. Are we “proles” to them? Probably. But like those who define “prole” on these boards to mean someone who is incapable of rising out of the unwashed miasma of their lowbrow culture, we’re pretty thankful for who we are and what we’ve done. We stick together, our communities are strong and faithful.
So who’s the prole?
Comment by Barry — January 21, 2010 @ 6:56 am
Trumwill,
The point isn’t that there are a few exceptions, but that there are so many. Warehouse workers reading Kant and Plato is a red herring. How many PEs do you think are reading Kant? Not too many. That sort of intellectual discourse is pretty rare in any workplace outside of academia. I think the last time I had a discussion about philosophy while I was on a clock was back when I was in the Army Reserve, with a couple of other NCOs, both of whom had philosophy degrees. One worked in a bank in New York, and the other was a cop in the NJ town where the Reserve unit was based. He came to a drill with a giant cast on his hand once, from punching some kid in the head at a protest or something during his day job.
If you want to draw the demarcation culturally rather than intellectually, that’s problematic too. I’m reminded of a great line from The Caine Mutiny, about how listening to opera was considered by upper class WASPs to be a sign of class — unless you were Italian.
Another reason why it’s problematic is because of how popular our mass culture is. Draw a Venn diagram of the TV shows watched by the warehouse workers and the engineers and you’ll see a ton of overlap; it’s not as if all the warehouse guys are watching American Idol and all the engineers are watching Nova.
BTW, I think the link you tried to embed in your comment is broken.
Comment by DaveinHackensack — January 21, 2010 @ 8:30 am
There are some interesting regional aspects to it, Barry. I know that sometimes when Half Sigma goes half-cocked on Sarah Palin, some of the examples he uses to demonstrate her proleness are regional in nature. In Alaska and great swaths of the west, hunting is not a “prole” behavior. From NYC it seems to him like it is. Ditto for where I was raised, actually.
Also, like I’m about to tell Dave, the use of “prole” as a descriptive does not have to be a moral judgment. It has the tendency to be because the people doing the talking are typically people who wouldn’t want to live amongst them. For my part, I don’t view proleness as terrible. Mostly just people that are different from myself. There may be behaviors I see among them that I don’t approve of, but that’s true of a lot of social groups. It doesn’t mean that everything I associate with said social groups is necessarily bad.
Your comments about “these are not the people I would choose to hang out with” are spot on.
Comment by trumwill — January 21, 2010 @ 9:38 am
Dave,
PEs?
I chose Kant and Plato as an exaggerated example. Now I’ll choose one from real life. One of the guys I knew from Wildcat that worked in the warehouse was a voracious reader of political commentary. He had a subscription to The New Republic, The National Review, and various right-wing publications. Another guy I knew that worked in the warehouse at Monmark-Soyokaze read all sorts of books like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. These were obviously people that liked to think about things.
So I know that it’s not unheard of. There are exceptions abound. However, I repeat my earlier question: is it really your position that there are no substantive cultural differences between those that work in the warehouse and those that work in the office and that there is no difference in where their kids, in the aggregate, are going to end up in life? As a guy that has spent significant amounts of time in each place and got to know people in both places, you’ve got blinders on if your answer is “not really.” I would also add that these are things I picked up on looooong before I ever heard the word “prole.” There just wasn’t a word for it outside of collar distinctions.
Regarding the opera, sometimes the differences in tastes are intellectually pretty neutral. Just because proles like one thing and yuppies like another does not mean that the latter is actually any better than the former. But it can still be helpful in noting differences. I would actually say that a lot of the behavior patterns that differentiate between proles and yuppies are relatively neutral. Some may favor proles.
When I say that there was a lot that I liked about Julie’s family, I’m not at all being condescending. When I was going to marry her, I was going to join her community and not vice-versa. They were a whole lot that the people I went to high school with weren’t and that was a good thing. A little time and distance, though, and I realize that however much I admired aspects of them, it wasn’t a place I would have fit in to.
Of course, I didn’t fit in where I was raised, either. One of the other things about proledom is that I view it as a spectrum. The differences are exaggerated by self-segregation. I have very prole tastes in food, for example. I’m not going to pretend, though, that my affinity for processed foods was equally accepted and adopted in the warehouse and in the office.
Anyhow, I’m going to wind this down (on my end, you get last word) for now because I have been inspired to write a post on my experiences in Julie’s hometown and my own as well as the office/warehouse experiences.
Comment by trumwill — January 21, 2010 @ 9:54 am
On the subject of many of the distinctions being value-neutral, in some cases they cut decidedly in favor of proles. Among other things, they’re willing to get their hands dirty in a way that yuppies are not. They’re far more willing to become soldiers, for instance, and police officers. And not for the oft-cited reasons of economic necessity. I get paid less than the welders and machinists at Wildcat did, but I still wouldn’t want the jobs they do with less complaint than I have had about my jobs.
But again, that doesn’t mean that the distinctions are meaningless. It does mean, though, that if I had a choice to live in a community of welders and a community of information workers, I’d choose to live in the latter.
Comment by trumwill — January 21, 2010 @ 10:47 am
I think this discussion boils down to conclusions.
There are some people that enjoy the “finer” things in life and value a night out at the opera or the symphony followed by a philosophical discussion with friends, and there are some people that like to have a burger and fries at McD’s before watching the playoffs back at the trailer.
What we conclude from these two facts determines how we define a “prole”. If you think the two types of people are basically morally indistinct from one another, with neither exhibiting a greater inherent worth than the other then you define it one way. If you believe that one or the other is necessarily “better” than the other, then you define it another way.
I think to have a fruitful discussion, we need new terms so everyone knows what they’re talking about. Otherwise the discussion revolves around semantics more than the actual subject matter.
I personally, just through this discussion and some previous, am coming to really dislike the word “prole” since in itself it’s a snobby word. It confers a value judgment before you even can apply it to a situation. So I say what you mean instead of couching it inside a term not many understand. You don’t mean “prole”, you mean “trailer trash” or “damn yankee” or any number of deragotory class-based descriptors. At least be honest.
Comment by Barry — January 21, 2010 @ 12:37 pm
The word itself is basically a social class distinction. People that believe that the social classes confer moral superiority tend to view downward classes as being inferior. For my part, if I view proles as being inferior to me, then I have to view posh well-to-do’s as being superior to me.
I didn’t just fail to fit in out in Phillippi… I failed at upper-crest Mayne High School, either based in part on class markers. They were a bunch of snobs. I find it too convenient to suggest that it’s slobs below me and snobs above me and I just happened to be right in the goodly middle.
Comment by trumwill — January 21, 2010 @ 1:16 pm