Word: packards
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...status seeking, it was a serious goof: no smart social climber wants to be caught showing too much interest in the book, since anyone in secure social status should be above any concern with the restless and near-universal scramble for position that Author Vance (The Hidden Persuaders) Packard undertakes to describe...
...years ago Britain's Nancy Mitford wittily divided the social scene into U (for Upper Class) and non-17. Things are not that simple in the U.S., and in Author Packard's scheme there are Real U and Semi-U, both belonging to the college-bred "Diploma Elite"; then there are the "Supporting Classes,'' in turn subdivided into Limited-Success. Working Class and Real Lower (in his definitions, Packard rarely gets much more precise than to say that the Diploma Elite consists of "the big, active, successful people who pretty much run things" ). This structure, asserts...
...Packard's examples of this struggle are frequently arresting-the builders who try to make their houses sound classy (Une maison ranch très originate), the executive who had his parents moved from an unfashionable cemetery to a posher last resting place. The trouble is that too much of what Author Packard observes is old hat, such as the upper-class preference for old hats over flashy new ones. He over-generalizes. One dubious example: Americans of Anglo-Saxon ancestry like to point to their past by living in Early American, white clapboard houses, while Jews prefer modern...
...times Packard is patently misinformed, as when he asserts that class structures are more flexible in Britain than in the U.S., and he over-sentimentalizes the American past, suggesting that only yesterday Horatio Alger was king. "Status striving" to him seems to be a modern menace, and he writes of it with scant mention of Thorstein ("conspicuous consumption") Veblen or of the massive, fascinating and often exhilarating social climbs described by Balzac, Stendhal, Jane Austen...
Interesting though much of Packard's evidence may be, it never really proves his basic point that U.S. class lines are hardening. In fact it suggests just the opposite-a continually changing social scene. At one point Packard himself concedes that the "American populace [is] arranged along a continuum [with] a series of bulges and contractions." Much of what Packard describes as status seeking is indeed foolish, and some of it may be evil; but much of it is also the result of man's human status, and the product of a free and mobile society...