Word: blue-collar
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...Paul, giant Midwest Federal Savings & Loan Association, responding to similar appeals, has agreed to increase its central-city loans from $19 million to $85 million this year. In Boston last month, citizen groups and local banks formed Neighborhood Housing Services, Inc. to secure loans for rehabilitating houses in two blue-collar sections of Dorchester and Roxbury...
...joints and he will be a working man for a day until a bath after supper has swept these petty distinctions from his natural form. Coleman's earnest, nearlaughable effort to play the role to its hilt--munching the very last of the grits at the oh-so blue-collar diner, mouthing the curse-words he once choked on in front of his students--bespeaks his own faith that only these outward circumstances distinguish the working...
...personal search--for the lost muscles in his back, for the simple and direct language he knows he will find in the ditch. So he settles into comfortable generalizations, of the meaningless sophistication of white-collar workers who perform interesting tasks and the rude but honest manners of blue-collar workers who execute monotonous manual labor. Coleman chants vacuously at the conclusion that he set out to learn something but instead found a lost part of himself...
...construction workers on girders are still throwing nails at the academics below. Meanwhile, doesn't Coleman cut a suspicious figure? He plunges into the lower-class welter, frolicking in ditches and finding new muscles in his back (and also finding himself), keeping a semi-stupid diary and publishing Blue-Collar Journal, warning us against any politics in ditches...
Coleman's declaration of opposition between workers and students suddenly seems less a studied position than a personal effort to justify his own small-minded excursion. The man's search for his lost half prompts him to rope off the blue-collar world, to preserve it from self-righteous student-socialists, to leave it for bankers and college presidents to find their submerged forgotten selves...