Word: collaring
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Eventually, Coleman progresses to positions as salad man and garbage collector, but in the chronicle of his stay, Blue-Collar Journal, he never manages to ditch this early alter-ego. For while he maintains a certain down-to-earth, unpatronizing attitude toward the class he is visiting, the chunks of sociology he offers back up to us higher orders tumble back down upon his head, groundless, as often as they manage to make the grade. Coleman is forever uncertain of the proper distance to keep from his proletarian brothers, usually resolving the conflict between his roles as observer and participant...
John R. Coleman is chairman of the board at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, and president of Haverford College. His daily scribblings from a two-month leave he took last spring to live a working-class existence are compiled in Blue-Collar Journal. The narrative follows Coleman's jaunt through three main jobs in Atlanta, Boston and Washington, but now and then wanders to an apparently still-rankling divorce in New York City and an honest youth in Canada...
...have lost. Perhaps Coleman could have made his book a testimonial to the "whole man," but fortunately he is not so pompous. In fact, one of the man's few virtues is his lack of condescension. The journal is full of simple declarations of the equalness of blue-collar and white-collar man, and the trusting plain-faced manner in which Coleman voices this truth makes one believe he is not mouthing high-falutin' doctrine...
...Coleman, it is semblances that mark the working man different from the college professor. Give a man a blue collar, lace him up in boots and levis, rub dirt into his hands, face and 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...
...larger sense of the working man's plight is obfuscated by Coleman's 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...