How I ended up the person I am today

For an American, I take an unhealthy interest in class. This, like so much else in my life, I blame on my mother. Rules were never much of an issue in our house, but behaviors that deviated from the upper-middle-class paradigm were verboten. What follows are some thoughts on the subject of social class, handed down in my family from generation to generation:

Household Furnishings & Decoration
• The well-bred own no more than one television, which should be tiny and hidden in a far-flung corner of the house. Extra points if you don’t have cable or color TV.

• Books should be well-worn and scattered liberally throughout the home. Extra points for James Joyce and foreign-language books.

• Objects you won’t find in an upper-middle-class house: fake fruit, plastic slipcovers, oak-veneered home entertainment centers, bed skirts, John Grisham novels, framed photographs of Ronald Reagan.

Personal Appearance
• It’s vulgar to be too well put together. Fake nails, fussy hairstyles, and designer clothes are the domain of parvenus. An element of shabbiness in personal appearance denotes refinement.

• Upper-middle-class men don’t wear jewelry. Upper-middle-class women wear only small, understated jewelry; a 5-karat diamond is terribly nouveau.

Child Rearing
• Manners are of little value to upper-middle-class parents, whose focus is on cultivating their children’s self-expression – out-and-out rudeness isn’t tolerated, but eating spaghetti with one’s fingers is.

• Corporal punishment is for the poor. Middle-class parents generally discipline through the cunning use of time-outs, and the rich don’t discipline at all. They’re far too busy and important.

Comestibles
• Foods you won’t find in an upper-middle-class kitchen: chicken nuggets, canned vegetables, pasteurized cheese product, tater tots, grape jelly, white zinfandel, bologna, infant formula.

• Foods you will absolutely find in an upper-middle-class kitchen: organic broccoli, free range Cornish game hens, aged balsamic vinegar, fair trade coffee. Also some assortment of dairy/gluten/egg/meat/soy/peanut-free products – food sensitivities are big right now.

• The upper-middle-diet is, above all else, inconvenient. I went with veganism, but fruitarianism, raw foodism, the cave man diet, and macrobiotics are even better.

Linguistics
• The New Yorker who says “idear” obviously comes from a blue collar background, as does the Michigander who says “melk.” If you’re upper-middle-class and under the age of 40, your speech isn’t so provincial as to betray your place of birth.

• To use the word “see” when you really mean “give” is lower-middle-class at best. For example, if at dinner you ask to “see” the peas, you’re most likely dining in a trailer.

The pleasures of butt sniffing.....

If you want me to watch a television show – and you do, since I’m what’s known in marketing circles as a “tastemaker” – you need to do two things and two things only. First, assemble a British cast; everything’s better with accents. Second, throw in some puppies; everything’s better with puppies.

Much as I love it, I recognize that British television programming is not smarter than its American counterpart. This is simply a myth, readily understood as such by anyone who’s ever watched Dr. Who, a show about a 900 year old humanoid alien who travels through space and time in a phone booth, presciently anticipating Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. For the most part, science fiction is colossally nonsensical, the sort of thing only idiots and autistics could genuinely appreciate, but Dr. Who, ostensibly as moronic as Star Trek and its ilk, is an exception. What separates it from its brainless brethren is its charm, which I attribute wholly to the accents.

Britons sound so smart that any Dr. Who devotee has little choice but to view it not as the retarded catastrophe it would be were it American, but rather as a camp extravaganza. Being British, I suspect the show’s masterminds appreciate that more inane aspects of Dr. Who are really, truly worthy of ridicule: bad graphics, cheesy dialogue, no acknowledgement of the more philosophically complex issues related to time travel. The awareness I ascribe to them, rightly or wrongly, turns what could be an arduous viewing experience into a rollicking good time, which is why I’m all about tuning into BBC America and suspending my disbelief.

As for puppies, they’re just so adorable I’ll watch them do anything, including play football. Animal Planet’s answer to the Super Bowl, Puppy Bowl VII, aired this past Sunday, and I’m not ashamed to admit I watched. Puppies obviously don’t take direction well, nor are they possessed of the competitive spirit so prevalent among human athletes, so canine football differs somewhat from the American variety. That being said, I’m way too stupid to understand football, so watching puppies sniff each others’ butts is far more rewarding.

On a related note, puppies are a great addition not only to television programming, but to commercials as well. In fact, I’m biased toward any advertisement featuring a baby animal, irrespective of species, particularly if he’s asleep; if on top of it all he’s wearing pajamas, I’m buying whatever you’re selling.