Class Is Permanent Quotes

Until the philosophy which hold one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned... Everything is war. Me say war. That until the're no longer 1st class and 2nd class citizens of any nation... Until the color of a man's skin is of no more significa...nce than the color of his eyes, me say war. That until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race me say war!

Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned, everywhere is war. And until there are no longer first-class and second-class citizens of any nation, until the colour of a man's skin is of no more significance than the colour of his eyes. And until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race, there is war. And until that day, the dream of lasting peace, world citizenship, rule of international morality, will remain but a fleeting illusion to be pursued, but never attained... now everywhere is war.” - Popularized by Bob Marley in the song War

You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help little men by tearing down big men. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn. You cannot build character and courage by destroying men's initiative and independence. And you cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they can and should do for themselves.

It was just so...permanent. Choosing a class became choosing a discipline, and choosing a discipline became choosing a career, and choosing a career became choosing a life, and how was anyone supposed to do that, when you only had one?

I believe in aristocracy, though -- if that is the right word, and if a democrat may use it. Not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secreat understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos. Thousands of them perish in obscurity, a few are great names. They are sensitive for others as well as themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but power to endure, and they can take a joke.

The corporations that profit from permanent war need us to be afraid. Fear stops us from objecting to government spending on a bloated military. Fear means we will not ask unpleasant questions of those in power. Fear permits the government to operate in secret. Fear means we are willing to give up our rights and liberties for promises of security. The imposition of fear ensures that the corporations that wrecked the country cannot be challenged. Fear keeps us penned in like livestock.

Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned - well, everywhere there's war. And until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race - it's a war. And until there's no longer first-class or second-class citizens of any nation... Until the color of a man's skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes - it's a war. Until that day the dream of lasting peace, world citizenship, and a rule of international morality will remain in but a fleeting illusion to be pursued, but never attained.

I acquired expensive habits and affected manners. I got a third-class degree and a first-class illusion: that I was a poet. But nothing could have been less poetic that my seeing-through-all boredom with life in general and with making a living in particular. I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope-- an impotence, in short; and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all. But I did absorb a small dose of one permanently useful thing, Oxford's greatest gift to civilized life: Socratic honesty. It showed me, very intermittently, that it is not enough to revolt against one's past. One day I was outrageously bitter among some friends about the Army; back in my own rooms later it suddenly struck me that just because I said with impunity things that would have apoplexed my dead father, I was still no less under his influence. The truth was I was not a cynic by nature, only by revolt. I had got away from what I hated, but I hadn't found where I loved, and so I pretended that there was nowhere to love. Handsomely equipped to fail, I went out into the world.

We could choose to be a nation that extends care, compassion, and concern to those who are locked up and locked out or headed for prison before they are old enough to vote. We could seek for them the same opportunities we seek for our own children; we could treat them like one of “us.” We could do that. Or we can choose to be a nation that shames and blames its most vulnerable, affixes badges of dishonor upon them at young ages, and then relegates them to a permanent second-class status for life. That is the path we have chosen, and it leads to a familiar place.

We believe in an aristocracy... Not an aristocracy of power, based on rank or wealth, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky. Our members are found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between us when we meet... We represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory over cruelty and chaos. We're an invincible army, but not a victorious one. We've had different names throughout history, but all the words that describe us are false and all attempts to organize us fail. Right now we're called V.F.D., but all our schisms and arguments might cause us to disappear. It won't matter. People like us always slip through the net. Our true home is the imagination, and our kingdom is the wide-open world.

In the radical feminist view, the new feminism is not just the revival of a serious political movement for social equality. It is the second wave of the most important revolution in history. Its aim: the overthrow of the oldest, most rigid class/caste system in existence, the class system based on sex - a system consolidated over thousands of years, lending the archetypal male and female roles and undeserved legitimacy and seeming permanence.

Christianity is always out of fashion because it is always sane; and all fashions are mild insanities. When Italy is mad on art the Church seems too Puritanical; when England is mad on Puritanism the Church seems too artistic. When you quarrel with us now you class us with kingship and despotism; but when you quarrelled with us first it was because we would not accept the divine despotism of Henry VIII. The Church always seems to be behind the times, when it is really beyond the times; it is waiting till the last fad shall have seen its last summer. It keeps the key of a permanent virtue.

You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred. You cannot build character and courage by taking away people's initiative and independence. You cannot help people permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves.

Day by day, month by month, doubt by doubt, law and order became fascism; education, constraint; work, alienation; revolution, mere sport; leisure, a privilege of class; marijuana, a harmless weed; family, a stifling hothouse; affluence, oppression; success, a social disease; sex, an innocent pastime; youth, a permanent tribunal; maturity, the new senility; discipline, an attack on personality; Christianity... and the West... and white skin...

In one of Plato's seminars a young man with a rural accent stood up one day and said Plato's philosophy was nonsense. You can have ideas that are neither real nor permanent. They can be mere fleeting fantasies. Plato evicted the student, whose name was Aristotle. Unlike Plato, Aristotle was not one of the gilded youth of Athenian society. His social background was solid middle class. But such was the encyclopedic knowledge he came to exhibit, and his skill in logical argument, that in time Aristotle gained rich benefactors, including the king of Macedonia who hired Aristotle to tutor his young son, later known as Alexander the Great.

I had let it all grow. I had supposed It was all OK. Your life Was a liner I voyaged in. Costly education had fitted you out. Financiers and committees and consultants Effaced themselves in the gleam of your finish. You trembled with the new life of those engines. That first morning, Before your first class at College, you sat there Sipping coffee. Now I know, as I did not, What eyes waited at the back of the class To check your first professional performance Against their expectations. What assessors Waited to see you justify the cost And redeem their gamble. What a furnace Of eyes waited to prove your metal. I watched The strange dummy stiffness, the misery, Of your blue flannel suit, its straitjacket, ugly Half-approximation to your idea Of the properties you hoped to ease into, And your horror in it. And the tanned Almost green undertinge of your face Shrunk to its wick, your scar lumpish, your plaited Head pathetically tiny. You waited, Knowing yourself helpless in the tweezers Of the life that judges you, and I saw The flayed nerve, the unhealable face-wound Which was all you had for courage. I saw that what you gripped, as you sipped, Were terrors that killed you once already. Now I see, I saw, sitting, the lonely Girl who was going to die. That blue suit. A mad, execution uniform, Survived your sentence. But then I sat, stilled, Unable to fathom what stilled you As I looked at you, as I am stilled Permanently now, permanently Bending so briefly at your open coffin.

SETH KLARMAN: Most of these characteristics are not permanent. Something broadly accepted can become controversial or even taboo. Information can become more or less available. Thus, an asset class deemed close to efficient at one point may become quite inefficient at another. European

There are only four ways in which a ruling group can fall from power. Either it is conquered from without, or it governs so inefficiently that the masses are stirred to revolt, or it allows a strong and discontented Middle Group to come into being, or it loses its own self-confidence and willingness to govern. These causes do not operate singly, and as a rule all four of them are present in some degree. A ruling class which could guard against all of them would remain in power permanently. Ultimately the determining factor is the mental attitude of the ruling class itself.

The man who is possessed of wealth, who lolls on his sofa, or rolls in his carriage, cannot judge of the wants or feelings of the day laborer. The government we mean to erect is intended to last for ages. ... unless wisely provided against, what will become of your government? In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of the landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes...

Perhaps most strikingly of all, it was clear in 1988 that those inside the process had congealed into a permanent political class, the defining characteristic of which was its readiness to abandon those not inside the process.

Below that are "the proles," numbering perhaps eight-five per cent of the population. In terms of our earlier classification, the proles are the Low, for the slave population of the equatorial lands, who pass constantly from conqueror to conqueror, are not a permanent or necessary part of the structure.

The iron fettering on the gate read "Arbeit Macht Frei". "What do you think that means?" asked a man from behind them in line. "Abandon hope all ye who enter here," replied Alexander. "No," said Misnoy. "It means, 'Work will set you free,'" "Like I was saying." Misnoy laughed. "This must be a Class One camp. For political prisoners. Probably Sachsenhausen. In Buchenwald, the engraving didn't say that. It was for more serious, more permanent offenders." "Like you?" "Like me." He smiled pleasantly. "Buchenwald read, 'Jeden das Seine. To Each His Own.'" "The Germans are so fucking inspiring," said Alexander.

I believe in aristocracy. . . — if that is the right word, and if a democrat may use it. Not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos.

The rich get the assets, the poor get the debt, and then the poor have to pay their whole salary to the rich every year just to live in a house. The rich use that money to buy the rest of the assets from the middle class and then the problem gets worse every year. The middle class disappears, spending power disappears permanently from the economy, the rich becoming much fucking richer and the poor, well, I guess they just die.

He was beginning to see how having a teenager might be the equivalent of having a bad class in permanent session.

To make a career of rescuing people is also to create a permanent class in need of rescue.

What’s the best practical joke you’ve ever played on another camper? Connor: The golden mango! Travis: Oh, dude, that was awesome. Connor: So anyway, we took this mango and spray painted it gold, right? We wrote: “For the hottest” on it and left it in the Aphrodite cabin while they were at archery class. When they came back, they started fighting over it, trying to figure out which of them was the hottest. It was so funny. Travis: Gucci shoes were flying out the windows. The Aphrodite kids were ripping each other’s clothes and throwing lipstick and jewelry. It was like a rabid herd of wild Bratz. Connor: Then they figured out what we’d done, and they tracked us down. Travis: That was not cool. I didn’t know they made permanent makeup. I looked like a clown for a month. Connor: Yeah. They put a curse on me so that no matter what I wore, my clothes were two sizes too small and I felt like a geek. Travis: You are a geek.

You were in business making meth? Do you have any idea what that drug does to people?" We weren't givin' it away," Concise snaps. "If someone was fool enough to mess himself up, that was his problem." I shake my head, disgusted. "If you build it, they will come." If you build it," Concise says, "you cover your rent. If you build it, you pay off the loan sharks. If you build it, you put shoes on your kid's feet and food in his belly and maybe even show up every now and then with a toy that every other goddamn kid in the school already has." He looks up at me. "If you build it, maybe your son don't have to, when he grow up." It is amazing -- the secrets you can keep, even when you are living in close quarters. "You didn't tell me." Concise gets up and braces his hands against the upper bunk. "His mama OD'd. He lives with her sister, who can't always be bothered to take care of him. I try to send money so that I know he's eatin' breakfast and gettin' school lunch tickets. I got a little bank account for him, too. Jus' in case he don't want to be part of a street gang, you know? Jus' in case he want to be an astronaut or a football player or somethin'." He digs out a small notebook from his bunk. "I'm writin' him. A diary, like. So he know who his daddy is, by the time he learn to read." It is always easier to judge someone than to figure out what might have pushed him to the point where he might do something illegal or morally reprehensible, because he honestly believes he'll be better off. The police will dismiss Wilton Reynolds as a drug dealer and celebrate one more criminal permanently removed from society. A middle-class father who meets Concise on the street, with his tough talk and his shaved head, will steer clear of him, never guessing that he, to, has a little boy waiting for him at home. The people who read about me in the paper, stealing my daughter during a custody visit, will assume I am the worst sort of nightmare.

It’s too late now. The game’s been won by companies who don’t two shits about community character or decent jobs. Congratufuckinglations, America! We did the deal. Now we’ve got an unlimited supply of cheap commodities and unhealthy food and crumbling downtowns, no sense of place, and a permanent under class. Yay. The underclass isn’t relegated to urban ghettos either. It’s coast to coast and especially in between. Take US 50 west from Kansas City to Sacramento or US 6 from Chicago to California and you’ll see a couple thousand miles of corn, soybeans, and terminally ill towns. It looks like a scene from The Walking Dead. If there’s such a thing as the American Heartland, it has a stake through it.

The end-game for statists is very obvious. If you expand the bureaucratic class and you expand the dependent class, you can put together a permanent electoral majority. In political terms, a welfare check is a twofer: you're assuring yourself of the votes of both the welfare recipient and of the mammoth bureaucracy required to process his welfare.

That the authority of the nation-state itself depended largely on the economic independence and political neutrality of its civil servants becomes obvious in our time; the decline of nations has invariably started with the corruption of its permanent administration and the general conviction that civil servants are in the pay, not of the state, but of the owning classes.

wanted an operation, not the boy-making kind, but a lever in the flesh, one I could permanently switch to off. I longed for immunity, distance, relief—not the end of all sex, but the end of the need, and more than the flesh, the end of the need for love

That until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned: That until there are no longer first-class and second class citizens of any nation; That until the color of a man's skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes; That until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race; That until that day, the dream of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained; And until the ignoble and unhappy regimes that hold our brothers in Angola, in Mozambique and in South Africa in subhuman bondage have been toppled and destroyed; Until bigotry and prejudice and malicious and inhuman self-interest have been replaced by understanding and tolerance and good-will; Until all Africans stand and speak as free beings, equal in the eyes of all men, as they are in the eyes of Heaven; Until that day, the African continent will not know peace. We Africans will fight, if necessary, and we know that we shall win, as we are confident in the victory of good over evil.

The value of Greek prose composition, he said, was not that it gave one any particular facility in the language that could not be gained as easily by other methods but that if done properly, off the top of one's head, it taught one to think in Greek. One's thought patterns become different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to life, finding miraculous new articulation. By necessity, I suppose, it is difficult for me to explain in English exactly what I mean. I can only say that an incendium is in its nature entirely different from the feu with which a Frenchman lights his cigarette, and both are very different from the stark, inhuman pur that the Greeks knew, the pur that roared from the towers of Ilion or leapt and screamed on that desolate, windy beach, from the funeral pyre of Patroklos. Pur: that one word contains for me the secret, the bright, terrible clarity of ancient Greek. How can I make you see it, this strange harsh light which pervades Homer's landscapes and illumines the dialogues of Plato, an alien light, inarticulable in our common tongue? Our shared language is a language of the intricate, the peculiar, the home of pumpkins and ragamuffins and bodkins and beer, the tongue of Ahab and Falstaff and Mrs. Gamp; and while I find it entirely suitable for reflections such as these, it fails me utterly when I attempt to describe in it what I love about Greek, that language innocent of all quirks and cranks; a language obsessed with action, and with the joy of seeing action multiply from action, action marching relentlessly ahead and with yet more actions filing in from either side to fall into neat step at the rear, in a long straight rank of cause and effect toward what will be inevitable, the only possible end. In a certain sense, this was why I felt so close to the other in the Greek class. They, too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape, centuries dead; they'd had the same experience of looking up from their books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not their home. It was why I admired Julian, and Henry in particular. Their reason, their very eyes and ears were fixed irrevocably in the confines of those stern and ancient rhythms – the world, in fact, was not their home, at least the world as I knew it – and far from being occasional visitors to this land which I myself knew only as an admiring tourist, they were pretty much its permanent residents, as permanent as I suppose it was possible for them to be. Ancient Greek is a difficult language, a very difficult language indeed, and it is eminently possible to study it all one's life and never be able to speak a word; but it makes me smile, even today, to think of Henry's calculated, formal English, the English of a well-educated foreigner, as compared with the marvelous fluency and self-assurance of his Greek – quick, eloquent, remarkably witty. It was always a wonder to me when I happened to hear him and Julian conversing in Greek, arguing and joking, as I never once heard either of them do in English; many times, I've seen Henry pick up the telephone with an irritable, cautious 'Hello,' and may I never forget the harsh and irresistible delight of his 'Khairei!' when Julian happened to be at the other end.

But these gains in freedom for both men and women often seem like a triumph of subtraction rather than addition. Over time, writes Coontz, Americans have come to define liberty “negatively, as lack of dependence, the right not to be obligated to others. Independence came to mean immunity from social claims on one’s wealth or time.” If this is how you conceive of liberty—as freedom from obligation—then the transition to parenthood is a dizzying shock. Most Americans are free to choose or change spouses, and the middle class has at least a modicum of freedom to choose or change careers. But we can never choose or change our children. They are the last binding obligation in a culture that asks for almost no other permanent commitments at all.

She took his verbal punches and she felt silenced under the mental prison that he had held her in. She looked perfect on the outside, but her body expressed her pain. Her soul was crystallized, permanently on survival-mode. He thought he was smart, but he had no idea that he was married to a lotus. She rose every time because she knew he could not take away her worth. She knew she was meant to have more. She loved herself through the horror, and regained her ability to keep walking, to keep breathing, to keep living. She rose peacefully like the lotus, elegant and full of class, untouched by his filthy, meaningless existence... and that had always left him powerless.

The vagrant, the squatter, had been redrawn, yet qualitatively he/she remained the same: a piece of white trash on the margins of rural society. Observers recognized how the moving mass of undesirables in the constantly expanding West challenged democracy’s central principle. California was a wake-up call. Anxious southerners focused attention not only on their slave society and slave economy, but on the ever-growing numbers of poor whites who made the permanently unequal top-down social order perfectly obvious. Who really spoke of equality among whites anymore? No one of any note. Let us put it plainly: on the path to disunion, the roadside was strewn with white trash.

Permanent War One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun. —REINHOLD NIEBUHR, Beyond Tragedy

Not doing something crude right off is about as close as a guy like me ever gets to class.

A socialist must be 'class-conscious', recognizing his identity as a member of the working class and understanding his interests as permanently against those of the master class.

Imprisonment, they say, now creates far more crime than it prevents, by ripping apart fragile social networks, destroying families, and creating a permanent class of unemployables.28

I believe in aristocracy, though—if that is the right word, and if a democrat may use it. Not an aristocracy of power … but … of the sensitive, the considerate.… Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos. Thousands of them perish in obscurity, a few are great names. They are sensitive for others as well as themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but the power to endure … E. M. Forster, “What I Believe,”         in Two Cheers for Democracy             Contents   Cover   Title Page   Copyright   Dedication   Epigraph   Preface   Are You Highly Sensitive? A Self-Test   1  The Facts About Being Highly Sensitive: A (Wrong) Sense of Being Flawed   2  Digging Deeper: Understanding Your Trait for All That It Is

For example, my choice of career. You generously and patiently gave me complete freedom.  Though this followed the habits, or at least the values, of the Jewish middle class concerning their sons.  And here your misunder-standing of my character worked its effect, which – together with your father’s pride – blinded you to my real nature: to my weakness.  In your opinion, I was always studying as a child, and  later I was always writing.  Looking back that      is certainly not true.  I can say with very little exaggeration, I barely studied and I learnt nothing; to have retained something after so many years of education wasn’t remarkable for a man with a memory and some intelligence;  but given the vast expenditure of time and money, and my outwardly easy, unburdened life, what I achieved with regard to knowledge, especially sound knowledge, was nothing – certainly when compared to what others managed.  It is lamentable, but for me understandable.  I always had such a deep concern about the continued existence of my mind and spirit, that I was indifferent to everything else.  Jewish schoolboys have a reputation, for amongst them one finds the most improbable things; but my cold, barely disguised, permanent, childish, ridiculous, animal, self-satisfied indifference, and my cold and fantastical mind, are not things that I have ever met again – though admittedly they were just a defence against nervous destruction through fear and guilt.  And I was worried about myself in all manner of ways.  For example, I was worried about my health: I was worried about my hair falling out, my digestion, and my back – for it was stooped.  And my worries turned to fear and it all ended in true sickness.  But what was all that?  Not actual bodily sickness.  I was sick because I was a disinherited son, who needed constant reassurance about his own peculiar existence, who in the most profound sense never owned anything, and who was even insecure about the thing which was next to him: his own body. 

Solving problems and settling issues is good lawmaking, but it’s not lucrative. It is gridlock, confusion, and rehashing fights that create streams of income—like an annuity—for the Permanent Political Class.

He had his own YouTube channel and a track available on iTunes. That sort of life profile carries a lot of cultural capital in a room full of middle-class white people in a permanent state of agony over their privilege.

Strong community is formed by powerful common experiences, as when people survive a flood or fight together in a battle. When they emerge on the other side, this shared experience becomes the basis for a deep, permanent bond that is stronger than blood. The more intense the experience, the more intense the bond. When we experience Christ’s radical grace through repentance and faith, it becomes the most intense, foundational event of our lives. Now, when we meet someone from a different culture, race, or social class who has received the same grace, we see someone who has been through the same life-and-death experience. In Christ, we have both spiritually died and been raised to new life (Rom 6:4 – 6; Eph 2:1 – 6). And because of this common experience of rescue, we now share an identity marker even more indelible than the ties that bind us to our family, our race, or our culture.

Here is how I got every single one of those jobs: I sat across a desk from a man old enough to be my father and I enveloped us both in a force field of earnest competence, the kind I’d been practicing since kindergarten with my hand permanently raised in class, the kind that says I will die before I let you down, and at some point in each of these interviews the man pronounced me “impressive” and gave me a job and the prophecy came true. I never let him down.

The child of the lower or lower middle class is urged in both overt and subtle ways to surpass his background, his well-meaning parents and friends never anticipating that if their dream of upward mobility is realized, the child may adopt the prejudices of the class to which he's lifted and, with a touch of neurotic distress, may permanently scorn his former life and also, to a certain extent, himself, since the class he's invaded is unlikely to accept him fully.

I believe in aristocracy, though - if that is the right word, and if a democrat may use it. Not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos. Thousands of them perish in obscurity, a few are great names. They are sensitive for others as well as for themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but the power to endure, and they can take a joke.

Now and then I am asked as to "what books a statesman should read," and my answer is, poetry and novels—including short stories under the head of novels. I don't mean that he should read only novels and modern poetry. If he cannot also enjoy the Hebrew prophets and the Greek dramatists, he should be sorry. He ought to read interesting books on history and government, and books of science and philosophy; and really good books on these subjects are as enthralling as any fiction ever written in prose or verse. Gibbon and Macaulay, Herodotus, Thucydides and Tacitus, the Heimskringla, Froissart, Joinville and Villehardouin, Parkman and Mahan, Mommsen and Ranke—why! there are scores and scores of solid histories, the best in the world, which are as absorbing as the best of all the novels, and of as permanent value. The same thing is true of Darwin and Huxley and Carlyle and Emerson, and parts of Kant, and of volumes like Sutherland's "Growth of the Moral Instinct," or Acton's Essays and Lounsbury's studies—here again I am not trying to class books together, or measure one by another, or enumerate one in a thousand of those worth reading, but just to indicate that any man or woman of some intelligence and some cultivation can in some line or other of serious thought, scientific or historical or philosophical or economic or governmental, find any number of books which are charming to read, and which in addition give that for which his or her soul hungers. I do not for a minute mean that the statesman ought not to read a great many different books of this character, just as every one else should read them. But, in the final event, the statesman, and the publicist, and the reformer, and the agitator for new things, and the upholder of what is good in old things, all need more than anything else to know human nature, to know the needs of the human soul; and they will find this nature and these needs set forth as nowhere else by the great imaginative writers, whether of prose or of poetry.

Another blatant case of regress as part of the capitalist progress is the enormous rise of precarious work. Precarious work deprives workers of a whole series of rights that, till recently, were taken as self-evident in any country which perceived itself as a welfare state: precarious workers have to take care themselves of their health insurance and retirement options; there is no paid leave; the future becomes much more uncertain. Precarious work also generates an antagonism within the working class, between permanently employed and precarious workers (trade unions tend to privilege permanent workers; it is very difficult for precarious workers even to organize themselves into a union or to establish other forms of collective self-organization). One would have expected that this increasing exploitation would also strengthen workers’ resistance, but it renders resistance even more difficult, and the main reason for this is ideological: precarious work is presented (and up to a point even effectively experienced) as a new form of freedom – I am no longer just a cog in a complex enterprise but an entrepreneur-of-the-self, I am a boss of myself who freely manages my employment, free to choose new options, to explore different aspects of my creative potential, to choose my priorities

You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by encouraging class hatred. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn. You cannot build character and courage by taking away man’s initiative and independence. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.

As the founders often cautioned, a self-governing republic doesn’t have a governing class. Part of America’s current predicament is that it now has a permanent, unelected one, unanswerable to the people. Absolutism—soft perhaps, but absolutism nonetheless—has replaced a democratic republic.

a nation is a choice.” We could choose to be a nation that extends care, compassion, and concern to those who are locked up and locked out or headed for prison before they are old enough to vote. We could seek for them the same opportunities we seek for our own children; we could treat them like one of “us.” We could do that. Or we can choose to be a nation that shames and blames its most vulnerable, affixes badges of dishonor upon them at young ages, and then relegates them to a permanent second-class status for life. That is the path we have chosen, and it leads to a familiar place.

The same cannot be said of James Buchanan. His impact is still being felt today. For it was Buchanan who guided Pinochet’s team in how to arrange things so that even when the country finally returned to representative institutions, its capitalist class would be all but permanently entrenched in power.

The older kind of Socialist, who had been trained to fight against something called ‘class privilege’, assumed that what is not hereditary cannot be permanent. He did not see that the continuity of an oligarchy need not be physical, nor did he pause to reflect that hereditary aristocracies have always been shortlived, whereas adoptive organisations such as the Catholic Church have sometimes lasted for hundreds or thousands of years. The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living. A

All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well-born, the other the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct permanent share in the government. . . . Can a democratic assembly who annually revolve in the mass of the people be supposed steadily to pursue the public good? Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy. . . .

But of all the things which I have mentioned that which most contributes to the permanence of constitutions is the adaptation of education to the form of government, and yet in our own day this principle is universally neglected. The best laws, though sanctioned by every citizen of the state, will be of no avail unless the young are trained by habit and education in the spirit of the constitution, if the laws are democratical, democratically or oligarchically, if the laws are oligarchical. For there may be a want of self-discipline in states as well as in individuals. Now, to have been educated in the spirit of the constitution is not to perform the actions in which oligarchs or democrats delight, but those by which the existence of an oligarchy or of a democracy is made possible. Whereas among ourselves the sons of the ruling class in an oligarchy live in luxury, but the sons of the poor are hardened by exercise and toil, and hence they are both more inclined and better able to make a revolution. And in democracies of the more extreme type there has arisen a false idea of freedom which is contradictory to the true interests of the state. For two principles are characteristic of democracy, the government of the majority and freedom. Men think that what is just is equal; and that equality is the supremacy of the popular will; and that freedom means the doing what a man likes. In such democracies every one lives as he pleases, or in the words of Euripides, 'according to his fancy.' But this is all wrong; men should not think it slavery to live according to the rule of the constitution; for it is their salvation.

The Civil War was ABOUT something. It was fought FOR something. And—let us never for a moment forget it—it WON something. Under everything else, the war was about Negro slavery. It was fought for freedom—and if ever anything was worth fighting a war for, freedom was and is the cause. . . . And that is why the Civil War is worth remembering. It gave us a broader freedom, and it laid upon us the obligation to live up to that freedom and to make it unlimited, for everybody. Freedom is indivisible. Winning it for the Negro, we won it also for all of the people who then were or ever would become Americans—for the man who has fled from oppression, misery and discrimination overseas as well as for the fugitive from the American slave pen and auction block. We can never have, permanently, a second-class citizenship in this country; because of the Civil War, we are no longer that kind of country. We might just as well stop trying to find a comfortable middle ground between the ideas of Abraham Lincoln and Adolf Hitler. There simply isn't any such place.

Mrs. Peters was a tall, thin woman who always wore dresses that resembled old, patterned sofas. Her hair was dark and curly and sat perfectly on the top of her head like a hat (and her students often thought it was). Through a pair of thick glasses, her eyes were permanently squinted from all the judgmental looks she had given her classes over the years.

continued. “The solution to almost every problem imaginable can be found in the outcome of a fairy tale. Fairy tales are life lessons disguised with colorful characters and situations. “‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf ’ teaches us the value of a good reputation and the power of honesty. ‘Cinderella’ shows us the rewards of having a good heart. ‘The Ugly Duckling’ teaches us the meaning of inner beauty.” Alex’s eyes were wide, and she nodded in agreement. She was a pretty girl with bright blue eyes and short strawberry-blonde hair that was always kept neatly out of her face with a headband. The way the other students stared at their teacher, as if the lesson being taught were in another language, was something Mrs. Peters had never grown accustomed to. So, Mrs. Peters would often direct entire lessons to the front row, where Alex sat. Mrs. Peters was a tall, thin woman who always wore dresses that resembled old, patterned sofas. Her hair was dark and curly and sat perfectly on the top of her head like a hat (and her students often thought it was). Through a pair of thick glasses, her eyes were permanently squinted from all the judgmental looks she had given her classes over the years. “Sadly, these timeless tales are no longer relevant in our society,” Mrs. Peters said. “We have traded their brilliant teachings for small-minded entertainment like television and video games. Parents now let obnoxious cartoons and violent movies influence their children. “The only exposure to the tales some children acquire are versions bastardized by film companies. Fairy

The Ewells, then, are not bit players in our country’s history. Their history starts in the 1500s, not the 1900s. It derives from British colonial policies dedicated to resettling the poor, decisions that conditioned American notions of class and left a permanent imprint. First known as “waste people,” and later “white trash,” marginalized Americans were stigmatized for their inability to be productive, to own property, or to produce healthy and upwardly mobile children—the sense of uplift on which the American dream is predicated. The American solution to poverty and social backwardness was not what we might expect. Well into the twentieth century, expulsion and even sterilization sounded rational to those who wished to reduce the burden of “loser” people on the larger economy.

Merely reducing sentence length, by itself, does not disturb the basic architecture of the New Jim Crow. So long as large numbers of African Americans continue to be arrested and labeled drug criminals, they will continue to be relegated to a permanent second-class status upon their release, no matter how much (or how little) time they spend behind bars. The system of mass incarceration is based on the prison label, not prison time.

By now, we can see the plea bargain for what it is: a weapon to be used in the continuation of a class war that has raged for centuries, one that began out in the open but has moved to the dark corners of airtight conference rooms. The goal is now as it ever was: prevent the masses from meddling in the affairs of the state. The lower classes are to be kept uninvolved, uneducated, and out of the courthouse, unless they are in chains.

He always liked learning. Loved it, really. If he could have spent his whole life sitting in a lecture hall, taking notes, could have drifted from department to department, haunting different studies, soaking up language and history and art, maybe he would have felt full, happy. That's how he spent the first two years. And those first two years, he was happy. He had Bea, and Robbie, and all he had to do was learn. Build a foundation. It was the house, the one that he was supposed to build on top of that smooth surface, that was the problem. It was just so... permanent. Choosing a class became choosing a discipline, and choosing a discipline became choosing a career, and choosing a career became choosing a life, and how was anyone supposed to do that, when you only had one? But teaching, teaching might be a way to have what he wanted. Teaching is an extension of learning, a way to be a perpetual student.

...having an arrest record was an inescapable censure that permanently destabilized the lives of working-class people. Arrested for being poor, the criminal legal system did its best to ensure they stayed poor forever. Regardless of whether they were convicted, for the rest of their lives they would face questions about their arrests in job interviews, on applications for government assistance, and while trying to get career licenses or join professional organizations.

Left and right in this sense are almost like spirits that flit from host to host, occupying the minds of millions of people at the same time, coordinating groups against each other. And as you start looking at the history of religions or political movements, you can start to see that each has a “left mode” for revolutionary offense and a “right mode” for ruling class defense. Why then do people often discuss left and right as if they were permanent classes rather than temporary tactics?

The reason, I am sure, that journalism is so popular a calling, in spite of its many drawbacks, is this: each journalist feels he is the boy walking up and down with the cane.  The Government, the Classes, and the Masses, Society, Art, and Literature, are the other children sitting on the doorstep.  He instructs and improves them. But I digress.  It was to excuse my present permanent disinclination to be the vehicle of useful information that I recalled these matters.  Let us now return.

The absolute monarch was supposed to serve the interests of the nation as a whole, to be the visible exponent and proof of the existence of such a common interest. The enlightened despotism was based on [Duc de] Rohan's "kings command the peoples and interest commands the king"; with the abolition of the king and sovereignty of the people, this common interest was in constant danger of being replaced by a permanent conflict among class interests and struggle for control of state machinery, that is, by a permanent civil war.

Class-Z mnestics are the last word in biochemical memory fortification. Class-Z mnestics permanently destroy the subject's ability to forget. The result is perfect eidetic memory and perfect immunity to arbitrarily strong antimemetic interference. The dose is taking effect now. Wheeler didn't read the book because she already knew every word of it. She knows everything that's about to happen to her. She can already feel her mind hardening, like steel, and the developing symptoms of extreme sensory overload. She can see everything.

What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man that age was which came to an end in August 1914! The greater part of the population, it is true, worked hard and lived at a low standard of comfort, yet were, to all appearances, reasonably contented with this lot. But escape was possible, for any man of capacity or character at all exceeding the average, into the middle and upper classes, for whom life offered, at a low cost and with the least trouble, conveniences, comforts, and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages. The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages; or he could decide to couple the security of his fortunes with the good faith of the townspeople of any substantial municipality in any continent that fancy or information might recommend. He could secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality, could despatch his servant to the neighbouring office of a bank for such supply of the precious metals as might seem convenient, and could then proceed abroad to foreign quarters, without knowledge of their religion, language, or customs, bearing coined wealth upon his person, and would consider himself greatly aggrieved and much surprised at the least interference. But, most important of all, he regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement, and any deviation from it as aberrant, scandalous, and avoidable. The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalisation of which was nearly complete in practice.

The most important fact to keep in mind, however, is this: debates about prison statistics ignore the fact that most people who are under correctional control today are not in prison. As noted earlier, of the nearly 7.3 million people currently under correctional control, only 1.6 million are in prison.27 This caste system extends far beyond prison walls and governs millions of people who are on probation and parole, primarily for nonviolent offenses. They have been swept into the system, branded criminals or felons, and ushered into a permanent second-class status—acquiring records that will follow them for life.

I believe in aristocracy, though—if that is the right word, and if a democrat may use it. Not an aristocracy of power ... but ... of the sensitive, the considerate.... Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos. Thousands of them perish in obscurity, a few are great names. They are sensitive for others as well as themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but the power to endure ...

As historian Lerone Bennett Jr. eloquently reminds us, 'A nation is a choice.' We could choose to be a nation that extends care, compassion, and concern to those who are locked up and locked out or headed for prison before they are old enough to vote. We could seek for them the same opportunities we seek for our own children; we could treat them like one of 'us.' We could do that. Or we can choose to be a nation that shames and blames its most vulnerable, affixes badges of dishonor upon them at young ages, and then relegates them to a permanent second-class status for life. That is the path we have chosen, and it leads to a familiar place.

I want to make it clear that I am not implying here that all housing issues can be solved through market solutions. Many cases of homelessness, for instance, particularly in affluent cities, stem from social welfare policies and require and immediate government action. It is important from the beginning to clearly separate emergency social welfare from housing policy. Too often, housing policy is conceived as an extension of social welfare applied to the middle class. In every large city, a small number of households - some may be one-person households - are unable to pay for their housing. They end up in the streets. These households may be permanently or temporarily disabled - physically or mentally - or may have experienced bad luck that results in long unemployment periods. It is certainly the duty of the government to provide a shelter for them as an emergency service. Once in an emergency shelter, social workers can identify those who are likely to be permanently unable to earn an income and then direct them toward a social housing shelter, where specialized staff will follow up on their case. Other homeless households may need only temporary help to find a job and a house they can afford before they rejoin the city's active population. The provision of homeless shelters is not part of housing policy, as it has little to do with supply and demand.

I stood outside Antilla for a long time watching the sun go down. I imagined that the tower was as deep as it was high. That it had a twenty-seven-story-long tap root, snaking around below the ground, hungrily sucking sustenance out of the earth, turning it into smoke and gold. Why did the Ambanis choose to call their building Antilla? Antilla is the name of a set of mythical islands whose story dates back to an eighth-century Iberian legend. When the Muslims conquered Hispania, six Christian Visigothic bishops and their parishioners boarded ships and fled. After days, or maybe weeks, at sea, they arrived at the isles of Antilla, where they decided to settle and raise a new civilization. They burned their boats to permanently sever their links to their barbarian-dominated homeland. By calling their tower Antilla, do the Ambanis hope to sever their links to the poverty and squalor of their homeland and raise a new civilization? Is this the final act of the most successful secessionist movement in India: the secession of the middle and upper classes into outer space? As night fell over Mumbai, guards in crisp linen shirts with crackling walkie-talkies appeared outside the forbidding gates of Antilla. The lights blazed on, to scare away the ghosts perhaps. The neighbors complain that Antilla’s bright lights have stolen the night. Perhaps it’s time for us to take back the night.

It’s too late now. The game’s been won by companies who don’t give two shits about community character or decent jobs. Congratufuckinglations, America! We did the deal. Now we’ve got an unlimited supply of cheap commodities and unhealthy food and crumbling downtowns, no sense of place, and a permanent under class. Yay. The underclass isn’t relegated to urban ghettos either. It’s coast to coast and especially in between. Take US 50 west from Kansas City to Sacramento or US 6 from Chicago to California and you’ll see a couple thousand miles of corn, soybeans, and terminally ill towns. It looks like a scene from The Walking Dead. If there’s such a thing as the American Heartland, it has a stake through it.

I think we're all just doing our best to survive the inevitable pain and suffering that walks alongside us through life. Long ago, it was wild animals and deadly poxes and harsh terrain. I learned about it playing The Oregon Trail on an old IBM in my computer class in the fourth grade. The nature of the trail has changed, but we keep trekking along. We trek through the death of a sibling, a child, a parent, a partner, a spouse; the failed marriage, the crippling debt, the necessary abortion, the paralyzing infertility, the permanent disability, the job you can't seem to land; the assault, the robbery, the break-in, the accident, the flood, the fire; the sickness, the anxiety, the depression, the loneliness, the betrayal, the disappointment, and the heartbreak. There are these moments in life where you change instantly. In one moment, you're the way you were, and in the next, you're someone else. Like becoming a parent: you're adding, of course, instead of subtracting, as it is when someone dies, and the tone of the occasion is obviously different, but the principal is the same. Birth is an inciting incident, a point of no return, that changes one's circumstances forever. The second that beautiful baby onto whom you have projected all your hopes and dreams comes out of your body, you will never again do anything for yourself. It changes you suddenly and entirely. Birth and death are the same in that way.

My perfect storm was nothing permanent. But of course it's far from the last storm I'll face. There will be many more. The key is building fires where you can. Warm yourself up as you wait for the tempest to pass. These fires, the routines, habits, relationships, and coping mechanisms you built, help you to look at the rain and see fertilizer instead of a flood. If you want the lushest green of life and you do, the grey is part of the natural cycle. You are not flawed. You're a human. You have gifts to share with the world and when the darkness comes, when you're fighting the demons, just remember. I'm right there fighting with you. You're not alone. The gems I found were forged in the struggle. Never, ever give up.

October first it was, fifteen past eight. For twenty minutes my heart was ringing, my soul was singing. Because he was typing on the other side. Just the hi, and hahaha. Silly, meaningless conversation, he didn’t even remember. That was my happiest twenty minutes. I stepped out of my house, got a haircut, I thought he’d like. After three days when my face was fine, I scrolled through his page, looked for the things he liked. Then I made a list of things to do, French class, swimming class, aerobics, and a road trip on November nineteen. On October first, fifteen past eight. My heart was ringing, my soul was singing because he wasn’t just typing on the other side. He was writing on my heart with a permanent marker, in pink.

The language of caste may well seem foreign or unfamiliar to some. Public discussions about racial caste in America are relatively rare. We avoid talking about caste in our society because we are ashamed of our racial history. We also avoid talking about race. We even avoid talking about class. Conversations about class are resisted in part because there is a tendency to imagine that one's class reflects upon one's character. What is key to America's understanding of class is the persistent belief - despite all evidence to the contrary - that anyone, with the proper discipline and drive, can move from a lower class to a higher class. We recognize that mobility may be difficult, but the key to our collective self-image is the assumption that mobility is always possible, so failure to move up reflects on one's character. By extension, the failure of a race or ethnic group to move up reflects very poorly on the group as a whole. What is completely missed in the rare public debates today about the plight of African Americans is that a huge percentage of them are not free to move up at all. It is not just that they lack opportunity, attend poor schools, or are plagued by poverty. They are barred by law from doing so. And the major institutions with which they come into contact are designed to prevent their mobility. To put the matter starkly: The current system of control permanently locks a huge percentage of the African American community out of the mainstream society and economy. The system operates through our criminal justice institutions, but it functions more like a caste system than a system of crime control. Viewed from this perspective, the so-called underclass is better understood as an undercaste - a lower caste of individuals who are permanently barred by law and custom from mainstream society. Although this new system of racialized social control purports to be colorblind, it creates and maintains racial hierarchy much as earlier systems of control did. Like Jim Crow (and slavery), mass incarceration operates as a tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined largely by race.

Which philosophers would Alain suggest for practical living? Alain’s list overlaps nearly 100% with my own: Epicurus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Plato, Michel de Montaigne, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Bertrand Russell. * Most-gifted or recommended books? The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, Essays of Michel de Montaigne. * Favorite documentary The Up series: This ongoing series is filmed in the UK, and revisits the same group of people every 7 years. It started with their 7th birthdays (Seven Up!) and continues up to present day, when they are in their 50s. Subjects were picked from a wide variety of social backgrounds. Alain calls these very undramatic and quietly powerful films “probably the best documentary that exists.” TF: This is also the favorite of Stephen Dubner on page 574. Stephen says, “If you are at all interested in any kind of science or sociology, or human decision-making, or nurture versus nature, it is the best thing ever.” * Advice to your 30-year-old self? “I would have said, ‘Appreciate what’s good about this moment. Don’t always think that you’re on a permanent journey. Stop and enjoy the view.’ . . . I always had this assumption that if you appreciate the moment, you’re weakening your resolve to improve your circumstances. That’s not true, but I think when you’re young, it’s sort of associated with that. . . . I had people around me who’d say things like, ‘Oh, a flower, nice.’ A little part of me was thinking, ‘You absolute loser. You’ve taken time to appreciate a flower? Do you not have bigger plans? I mean, this the limit of your ambition?’ and when life’s knocked you around a bit and when you’ve seen a few things, and time has happened and you’ve got some years under your belt, you start to think more highly of modest things like flowers and a pretty sky, or just a morning where nothing’s wrong and everyone’s been pretty nice to everyone else. . . . Fortune can do anything with us. We are very fragile creatures. You only need to tap us or hit us in slightly the wrong place. . . . You only have to push us a little bit, and we crack very easily, whether that’s the pressure of disgrace or physical illness, financial pressure, etc. It doesn’t take very much. So, we do have to appreciate every day that goes by without a major disaster.

Some scholars believe we have long since passed a tipping point where the declining marginal return on imprisonment has dipped below zero. Imprisonment, they say, now creates far more crime than it prevents, by ripping apart fragile social networks, destroying families, and creating a permanent class of unemployables.28 Although it is common to think of poverty and joblessness as leading to crime and imprisonment, this research suggests that the War on Drugs is a major cause of poverty, chronic unemployment, broken families, and crime today. Todd R. Clear’s book Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Communities Worse powerfully demonstrates that imprisonment has reached such extreme levels in many urban communities that a prison sentence and/or a felon label poses a much greater threat to urban families than crime itself.

One of the most remarkable things about our immigration policy is how unpopular it is. Only the ruling class supports it. For more than fifty years, Gallup has polled Americans on whether they want more immigration, less immigration, or about the same amount. Not a single time has a plurality supported higher immigration levels. When Americans are asked what their preferred level of annual immigration is, they almost always want less than the current norm of about one million new legal immigrants per year. America was radically and permanently changed, against the will of its own population, by the people who run the country. Dare to complain about that and you’ll be shouted down as a bigot, as if demanding representation in a democracy were immoral. Not surprisingly, many voters have concluded that our democracy isn’t real. In important ways, it’s not.

major piece of financial regulation—the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act—moved toward passage. Wall Street money flowed to some of its fiercest critics in the 2010 election. That year, seven out of the ten top recipients of Goldman Sachs contributions, for example, were Democrats. Former Clinton secretary of labor Robert Reich declared that this was evidence that Wall Street was “bribing elected officials with their donations.”14 I would argue that Reich had the power equation wrong. It was the Permanent Political Class that threatened to cause severe damage to the financiers—not the other way around. As the late economics professor Peter H. Aranson puts it, “The real market for contributions is one of ‘extortion’ by those who hold a monopoly on the use of coercion—the officeholders.”15 The midterm election passed, and so did Dodd-Frank.

Whether an activity is performed in private or in public is by no means a matter of indifference. Obviously, the character of the public realm must change in accordance with the activities admitted into it, but to a large extent the activity itself changes its own nature too. The laboring activity, though under all circumstances connected with the life process in its most elementary, biological sense, remained stationary for thousands of years, imprisoned in the eternal recurrence of the life process to which it was tied. The admission of labor to public stature, far from eliminating its character as a process—which one might have expected, remembering that bodies politic have always been designed for permanence and their laws always understood as limitations imposed upon movement—has, on the contrary, liberated this process from its circular, monotonous recurrence and transformed it into a swiftly progressing development whose results have in a few centuries totally changed the whole inhabited world. The moment laboring was liberated from the restrictions imposed by its banishment into the private realm—and this emancipation of labor was not a consequence of the emancipation of the working class, but preceded it—it was as though the growth element inherent in all organic life had completely overcome and overgrown the processes of decay by which organic life is checked and balanced in nature’s household. The social realm, where the life process has established its own public domain, has let loose an unnatural growth, so to speak, of the natural; and it is against this growth, not merely against society but against a constantly growing social realm, that the private and intimate, on the one hand, and the political (in the narrower sense of the word), on the other, have proved incapable of defending themselves. What

You should give him a picture of you to keep him company, if you know what I mean.” She frowns at me. “Do you know what I mean?” “Like, a sexy picture? No way!” I start backing away from her. “Look, I’ve gotta go to class.” The last thing I want to do is think about Peter and random girls. I’m still trying to get used to the idea that we won’t be together at UVA this fall. Chris rolls her eyes. “Calm down. I’m not talking about a nudie. I would never suggest that for you of all people. What I’m talking about is a pinup-girl shot, but not, like, cheesy. Sexy. Something Kavinsky can hang up in his dorm room.” “Why would I want him to hang up a sexy picture of me in his dorm room for all the world to see?” Chris reaches out and flicks me on the forehead. “Ow!” I shove her away from me and rub the spot where she flicked me. “That hurt!” “You deserved it for asking such a dumb question.” She sighs. “I’m talking about preventative measures. A picture of you on his wall is a way for you to mark your territory. Kavinsky’s hot. And he’s an athlete. Do you think other girls will respect the fact that he’s in a long-distance relationship?” She lowers her voice and adds, “With a Virgin Mary girlfriend?” I gasp and then look around to see if anyone heard. “Chris!” I hiss. “Can you please not?” “I’m just trying to help you! You have to protect what’s yours, Lara Jean. If I met some hot guy in Costa Rica with a long-distance gf who he wasn’t even sleeping with? I don’t think I’d take it very seriously.” She gives me a shrug and a sorry-not-sorry look. “You should definitely frame the picture too, so people know you’re not someone to mess with. A frame says permanence. A picture taped on a wall says here today, gone tomorrow.” I chew on my bottom lip thoughtfully. “So maybe a picture of me baking, in an apron--” “With nothing underneath?” Chris cackles, and I flick her forehead lightning quick. “Ow!” “Get serious then!

while the impact of social class, ethnicity, and religious socialization on marital choice has been diminishing, educational homogamy has been increasing.35 In general, the college-educated population (which encompasses the upper-middle class as defined in the present study) continues to show a high degree of similarity in its cultural practices and attitudes over a wide range of areas.36 The fact that a college degree remains the best predictor of high occupational status suggests that the boundaries that this population builds between itself and others are particularly significant.37 These boundaries are likely to be more permanent, less crossable, and less resisted than the boundaries that exist between ethnic groups, for instance. They are also more likely to survive across contexts, i.e., to be carried over from the community to the workplace, and vice versa. We see again, therefore, the importance of studying in a systematic fashion the boundaries produced by college-educated people.

It may be helpful, in attempting to understand the basic nature of the new caste system, to think of the criminal justice system--the entire collection of institutions and practices that comprise it--not as an independent system but rather as a gateway into a much larger system of racial stigmatization and permanent marginalization. This larger system, referred to here as mass incarceration, is a system that locks people not only behind actual bars in actual prisons, but also behind virtual bars and virtual walls--walls that are invisible to the naked eye but function nearly as effectively as Jim Crow laws once did at locking people of color into a permanent second-class citizenship. The terms mass incarceration refers not only to the criminal justice system but also to the larger web of laws, rules, policies, and customs that control those labeled criminals both in and out of prison. Once released, former prisoners enter a hidden underworld of legalized discrimination and permanent social exclusion. They are members of America's new undercaste.

We feel, mostly, that our actions matter, and that earnest communication is happening, that we are real and permanent and in control of our fate. And under normal circumstances, these things are (mostly) true: we are sane sailors on a sturdy ship in a calm harbor. But every now and then the scrim drops (there’s a scrim in this metaphorical harbor) and out there: the open ocean, huge waves, fierce winds. And we find ourselves heading out. Soon it becomes clear that we are not, after all, in control, not a high-functioning sailor standing stably on a nice calm deck, a deck that we have created through our virtue. The ship is pitching, and the deck is covered in ice, and we’re wearing special headphones that distort what our crewmates are shouting and special mouthpieces that distort what we’re shouting back in return. And now the ship is going down and some action is required, some cooperation, some compassion. And we intend to be compassionate, we really do, but the intended compassion, passing out through those distorting mouthpieces and being received through those distorting headphones, is off; it doesn’t help, and may even hurt, or, worst of all, may make no difference at all.

Achievement ceremonies are revealing about the need of the powerful to punish women through beauty, since the tension of having to repress alarm at female achievement is unusually formalized in them. Beauty myth insults tend to be blurted out at them like death jokes at a funeral. Memories of these achievement ceremonies are supposed to last like Polaroid snapshots that gel into permanent colors, souvenirs to keep of a hard race run; but for girls and young women, the myth keeps those colors always liquid so that, with a word, they can be smeared into the uniform shades of mud. At my college graduation, the commencement speaker, Dick Cavett—who had been a “brother” of the university president in an allmale secret society—was confronted by two thousand young female Yale graduates in mortarboards and academic gowns, and offered them this story: When he was at Yale there were no women. The women went to Vassar. There, they had nude photographs taken in gym class to check their posture. Some of the photos ended up in the pornography black market in New Haven. The punch line: The photos found no buyers. Whether or not the slur was deliberate, it was still effective: We may have been Elis but we would still not make pornography worth his buying. Today, three thousand men of the class of 1984 are sure they are graduates of that university, remembering commencement as they are meant to: proudly. But many of the two thousand women, when they can think of that day at all, recall the feelings of the powerless: exclusion and shame and impotent, complicit silence. We could not make a scene, as it was our parents’ great day for which they had traveled long distances; neither could they, out of the same concern for us. Beauty pornography makes an eating disease seem inevitable, even desirable, if a young woman is to consider herself sexual and valuable: Robin Lakoff and Raquel Scherr in Face Value found in 1984 that “among college women, ‘modern’ definitions of beauty—health, energy, self-confidence”—prevailed. “The bad news” is that they all had “only one overriding concern: the shape and weight of their bodies. They all wanted to lose 5–25 pounds, even though most [were] not remotely overweight. They went into great detail about every flaw in their anatomies, and told of the great disgust they felt every time they looked in the mirror.” The “great disgust” they feel comes from learning the rigid conventions of beauty pornography before they learn their own sexual value; in such an atmosphere, eating diseases make perfect sense.

I rewrote and re-sent the email—not to the head of the school now, but to his boss, the director of Field Service Group. Though he was higher up the totem pole than the head of the school, the D/FSG was pretty much equivalent in rank and seniority to a few of the personnel I’d dealt with at headquarters. Then I copied the email to his boss, who definitely was not. A few days later, we were in a class on something like false subtraction as a form of field-expedient encryption, when a front-office secretary came in and declared that the old regime had fallen. Unpaid overtime would no longer be required, and, effective in two weeks, we were all being moved to a much nicer hotel. I remember the giddy pride with which she announced, “A Hampton Inn!” I had only a day or so to revel in my glory before class was interrupted again. This time, the head of the school was at the door, summoning me back to his office. Spo immediately leaped from his seat, enveloped me in a hug, mimed wiping away a tear, and declared that he’d never forget me. The head of the school rolled his eyes. There, waiting in the school head’s office was the director of the Field Service Group—the school head’s boss, the boss of nearly everyone on the TISO career track, the boss whose boss I’d emailed.

Compare with Greek art, modern classical art is lacking in warmth and immediacy; it has a derived, retrospective, and, even in the Renaissance, a more or less classicistic character. It It is the reflection of a society which, filled with reminiscences of Roman heroism and medieval chivalry, tries to appear to be something which it is not, by following an artificially produced social and moral code, and which stylizes the whole pattern of its life in accordance with this fictitious scheme. Classical art describes this society as it wants to see itself and as it wants to be seen. There is hardly a feature in this art which would not, on closer examination, prove to be anything more than the translation into artistic terms of the aristocratic, conservative ideals cherished by this society striving for permanence and continuity. The whole artistic fromalism of the Cinquecento merely corresponds to the formalized system of moral conceptions and decorum which the upper class of the period imposes on itself. Just as the aristocracy and the aristocratically minded circles of society subject life to the rule of a formal code, in order to preserve it from the anarchy of the emotions, so they also submit the expression of the emotions in art to the censorship of definite, abstract, and impersonal forms.

In 1777 the rebels tried to round up the rest of Johnson’s former tenants, but they too escaped to Canada. For the remainder of the Revolution Sir John Johnson and his Scotsmen, together with their Iroquois allies, engaged in protracted and violent warfare with the American rebels along the northern frontier.18 Several other groups of recent immigrants remained loyal to the Crown. Although many Dutch and Germans supported the Revolution, those who maintained their own language and culture did not. Similarly, the Huguenots who settled in New Rochelle, the only French immigrants who continued to speak their native tongue, supported the British. William Nelson explains why: Taking all the groups and factions, sects, classes, and inhabitants of regions that seem to have been Tory, they have but one thing in common: they represented conscious minorities, people who felt weak and threatened. . . . Almost all the Loyalists were, in one way or another, more afraid of America than they were of Britain. Almost all of them had interests that they felt needed protection from an American majority. Being fairly certain that they would be in a permanent minority (as Quakers or oligarchs or frontiersmen or Dutchmen) they could not find much comfort in a theory of government . . . based on the “common good” if the common good was to be defined by a numerical majority.

They had forgotten that there exists in the modern world, perhaps for the first time in history, a class of people whose interest is not that things should happen well or happen badly, should happen successfully or happen unsuccessfully, should happen to the advantage of this party or the advantage of that part, but whose interest simply is that things should happen. It is the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern existence, that it must be a picture made up entirely of exceptions. We announce on flaring posters that a man has fallen off a scaffolding. We do not announce on flaring posters that a man has not fallen off a scaffolding. Yet this latter fact is fundamentally more exciting, as indicating that that moving tower of terror and mystery, a man, is still abroad upon the earth. That the man has not fallen off a scaffolding is really more sensational; and it is also some thousand times more common. But journalism cannot reasonably be expected thus to insist upon the permanent miracles. Busy editors cannot be expected to put on their posters, “Mr. Wilkinson Still Safe,” or “Mr. Jones, of Worthing, Not Dead Yet.” They cannot announce the happiness of mankind at all. They cannot describe all the forks that are not stolen, or all the marriages that are not judiciously dissolved. Hence the complete picture they give of life is of necessity fallacious; they can only represent what is unusual. However democratic they may be, they are only concerned with the minority.

The labour of some of the most respectable orders in the society is, like that of menial servants, unproductive of any value, and does not fix or realize itself in any permanent subject, or vendible commodity, which endures after that labour is past, and for which an equal quantity of labour could afterwards be procured. The sovereign, for example, with all the officers both of justice and war who serve under him, the whole army and navy, are unproductive labourers. They are the servants of the public, and are maintained by a part of the annual produce of the industry of other people. Their service, how honourable, how useful, or how necessary soever, produces nothing for which an equal quantity of service can afterwards be procured. The protection, security, and defence, of the commonwealth, the effect of their labour this year, will not purchase its protection, security, and defence, for the year to come. In the same class must be ranked, some both of the gravest and most important, and some of the most frivolous professions; churchmen, lawyers, physicians, men of letters of all kinds; players, buffoons, musicians, opera-singers, opera-dancers, etc. The labour of the meanest of these has a certain value, regulated by the very same principles which regulate that of every other sort of labour; and that of the noblest and most useful, produces nothing which could afterwards purchase or procure an equal quantity of labour. Like the declamation of the actor, the harangue of the orator, or the tune of the musician, the work of all of them perishes in the very instant of its production.

It has been widely said in the recent past that economic freedom can exist without the institution of property, because, under a Communist system, men own though they own corporately: they can dispose of their own lives, though such disposition be indirect and through delegates. This false argument is born of the dying Parliamentary theory of politics; it proceeds from the false statement which deceived three generations of Europe, from the French Revolution to our own day, that corporate action may be identified with individual action. So men speak of their so-called “Representatives” as having been “chosen” by themselves. But in experienced reality there is no such thing as this imagined permanent corporate action through delegation. On some very simple and universal point, which all understand, in which all are interested and on which all feel strongly, the desire of the bulk of people may be expressed for a brief moment by delegation. Men voting under strong emotion on one single clear issue, may instruct others to carry out their wishes; but the innumerable acts of choice and expression which make up human life can never work through a system of delegation. Even in the comparatively simple field of mere political action, delegation destroys freedom. Parliaments have everywhere proved irreconcilable with democracy. They are not the people. They are oligarchies, and those oligarchies are corrupt because they pretend to a false character and to be, or to mirror, the nation. They are in reality, and can only be, cliques of professional politicians; unless, indeed, they are drawn from an aristocratic class which the community reveres. For class government, the product of the aristocratic spirit, is the condition of oligarchies working successfully and therefore of a reasonably efficient Parliament. Such an instrument is not to be found save in the hands of a governing class.

Propaganda of integration The less educated and informed the people to whom propaganda of agitation is addressed, the easier it is to make such propaganda. That is why it is particularly suited for use among the so-called lower classes (the proletariat) and among African peoples. There it can rely on some key words of magical import, which are believed without question even though the hearers cannot attribute any real content to them and do not fully understand them.... In contrast to this propaganda of agitation is the PROPAGANDA OF INTEGRATION — the propaganda of developed nations and characteristic of our civilization; in fact it did not eXist before the 20TH century. It is a propaganda of conformity- It is related to the fact, analyzed earlier, that in Western society it is no longer sufficient to obtain a transitory political act (such as a vote); one needs total adherence to a society's truths and behavioral patterns. As the more perfectly uniform the societv, the stronger its power and effectiveness each member should be only an organic and functional fragment of it, perfectly adapted and integrated. He must share the stereotypes, beliefs and reactions of the group: he must be an active participant in its economic, ethical, esthetic, and political doings. All his activities, all his sentiments are dependent on this collectivity. And, as he is often reminded, he can fulfill himself only through this collectivity, as a member of the group. Propaganda of integration thus aims at making the individual participate in his society in every way. It is a long-term propaganda, a self-reproducing propaganda that seeks to obtain stable behavior, to adapt the individual to his everyday life, to reshape his thoughts and behavior in terms of the permanent social setting. We can see that this propaganda is more extensive and complex than propaganda of agitation it must be permanent, for the Individual can no longer be left to himself.

Nope- it was not! Ava and her girls that day went, and they cut a class at some point in the day and broke into my baby. Then Ava- ‘Rubbed one out!’ that means that she masturbated, and squirted her lady- juices all over the inside of my car. Yes- and I mean it went all over. It was on my seat on the dash, on the floor, and Ava smeared what creaminess that was on her two fingers on the windows, and driver’s side vent. As her clan, sisters pissed all over the carpet on the floor, and took their dumps on the seat, and left their thongs behind. Alison, she wrote a note on her undies saying- ‘Now you have some pairs to wear!’ It was so nasty! Plus- the outside was covered and wrapped with toilet paper as well as littered with Ava and her sisters used feminine products. What is wrong with these girls? What did I do to deserve this one? Likewise, the other kids thought it was the most humorous thing, which they ever witnessed at the end of the school day. When I discovered it- You know, I was utterly sick to my stomach. I think I screamed so loudly it echoed throughout the land, and started to cry and ran while being pushed around bouncing around off their bodies, I cannot remember- I was so upset, and then the kids were all around me kicking, and pushing me from one place to another. I was just like a hacky sack for them, until I passed out, and dropped to the hard ground. That gave them time for them to spit on me, and dump things like glue in my hair or whatever that shit was. Then what gets me is that she signed her name- Ava on the dashboard with a black permanent sharpie marker, and It reads, ‘Suck on this- Nevaeh- lick, what I gave you all up!’ and she drew a heart, with a line through it also. She wanted me to know because there was not a thing I could do about it. Depressed- to say that her juicy sprays were more yellowish, and a thick sticky white, then clear on my blue and white cloth seats. Yet, Hope had the car towed and cleaned for me inside and out, she could not believe what kids do these days. Therefore, that was the first time that I drove my car to school and the last. That whole thing cost me a lot. I guess it is back to the bus. That is what everyone wants is it not. This completely sucked; I have a car that I cannot drive anywhere other than at home or have locked up in the barn- with the other rust bucket car.

To start with, at that time I'd gone to bed with probably three dozen boys, all of them either German or English; never with a woman. Nonetheless -- and incredible thought it may seem -- I still assumed that a day would come when I would fall in love with some lovely, intelligent girl, whom I would marry and who would bear me children. And what of my attraction to men? To tell the truth, I didn't worry much about it. I pretended my homosexuality was a function of my youth, that when I "grew up" it would fall away, like baby teeth, to be replaced by something more mature and permanent. I, after all, was no pansy; the boy in Croydon who hanged himself after his father caught him in makeup and garters, he was a pansy, as was Oscar Wilde, my first-form Latin tutor, Channing's friend Peter Lovesey's brother. Pansies farted differently, and went to pubs where the barstools didn't have seats, and had very little in common with my crowd, by which I meant Higel and Horst and our other homosexual friends, all of whom were aggressively, unreservedly masculine, reveled in all things male, and held no truck with sissies and fairies, the overrefined Rupert Halliwells of the world. To the untrained eye nothing distinguished us from "normal" men. Though I must confess that by 1936 the majority of my friends had stopped deluding themselves into believing their homosexuality was merely a phase. They claimed, rather, to have sworn off women, by choice. For them, homosexuality was an act of rebellion, a way of flouting the rigid mores of Edwardian England, but they were also fundamentally misogynists who would have much preferred living in a world devoid of things feminine, where men bred parthenogenically. Women, according to these friends, were the “class enemy” in a sexual revolution. Infuriated by our indifference to them (and to the natural order), they schemed to trap and convert us*, thus foiling the challenge we presented to the invincible heterosexual bond. Such thinking excited me - anything smacking of rebellion did - but it also frightened me. It seemed to me then that my friends’ misogyny blinded them to the fact that heterosexual men, not women, had been up until now, and would probably always be, their most relentless enemies. My friends didn’t like women, however, and therefore couldn’t acknowledge that women might be truer comrades to us than the John Northrops whose approval we so desperately craved. So I refused to make the same choice they did, although, crucially, I still believed it was a choice.