Misanthrope's Corner May 4, 1998

F L O R E N C E

K I N G

Miss King is the author of The Florence King Reader and other books.

'CLASSIST," you may recall, is a neologism meaning someone who makes judgments based on social class. It's a perfectly good -ist, no better and no worse than any of our other -ists, -ites, and -phobes, but it never quite caught on. The only people who use it are the Marxist - feminist lunatic fringe and far-out black ranters who get on a roll and can't stop. To the latter, ``classist'' is a code word for whites who use ``underclass'' as a code word for blacks.
Everyone else has problems with it. In the first place, it's hard to pronounce and turns into a squirty hiss, tempting ableists to assume a speech defect and go through a drying-off pantomime. In the second place, the people who would normally use it -- liberal intellectuals -- have a mental block against it. As members of the class laboriously known as ``four or more years of higher education,'' they have already learned that a ``classicist'' is a specialist in Greek and Roman literature. Try as they might, they can't shake that extra syllable: ``classist'' simply sounds wrong to them, the product of a typing error like the inevitable ``feminity'' for femininity.
The third and most important reason why ``classist'' has failed to catch on is that it turns the unthinkable into a conscious thought. As Midge Decter wrote: ``Unconsciously is the only way Americans think about class.'' The subject skims across our minds like a hair blown across the face: a constant ticklish irritation, invisible but very much felt. If we tossed around a loaded word like ``classist,'' so many strands would come loose from the snarled knot of our classless society that we could never tuck them all back in neatly; to make ourselves presentable we would have to unpin the whole business and start all over again. But since counterrevolution is another unthinkable good idea, we play it safe and impugn class-conscious people with a name that connotes self- rather than natural selection: ``elitists.''
Conservatives have shown a special fondness for calling the media elitists but recent events suggest that we need something stronger. We should take up ``classist'' and pin it on the talking heads and ink-stained wretches who described Kathleen Willey as if she were the Infanta of Castile.
The 60 Minutes interview was barely over when the cheekbone obsession started. Willey's were ``sculptured,'' ``delicate,'' ``pronounced,'' ``winglike,'' ``aristocratic.'' I haven't heard so much about cheekbones since 1945. Whenever I read another Willey story I felt as if I were back in our old neighborhood movie theater watching Laura with Granny, who kept jabbing me in the ribs and whispering, ``Look at those cheekbones -- you can tell she's got good blood.''
Patrician adjectives flew as commentators ennobled Willey as though their lives depended on it. Her manner was ``refined,'' her grammar was ``cultivated,'' her diction was ``genteel,'' her makeup was ``understated,'' she had a ``Junior League'' wardrobe, ``finishing-school'' posture, a ``ladylike'' modesty, an ``upper class'' lifestyle,'' a ``Richmond society'' background, and ``Virginia aristocrat'' written all over her.
Between these lavish accolades and what we already knew about Willey lay a glaring contradiction that altogether eluded the social arbiters: airline stewardess is not a post-deb job. For well-born Southern women of Willey's age the Big Three sinecures were the historical society, the state archives -- both stamping grounds for legions of Daughters and Colonial Dames all talking about high cheekbones and good blood -- and the society page of the local paper. We had a post-deb when I was on the Raleigh News & Observer. Typical of the breed, she couldn't write but she was invaluable because she knew where all the bodies were buried -- whose wedding date had to be put back three months, why we must never photograph Mrs. A with Mrs. B, etc.
I wasn't surprised, therefore, when the shabby-wacky truth about Willey came out. When she fell from grace a subtle mood of let-down, even betrayal, seemed to pass over the media, invisible but very much felt. They had taken pains to point out that Willey did not have ``big hair'' but she had enough so that a single strand from her First-Families-of-Virginia coif had lain for a brief time across their collective face and made them quiver with joy. In spite of themselves, maybe without even realizing it, they had savored their interlude of unrestrained class-consciousness and were crushed when their Infanta turned out to be Pretender Spice.
THE most fascinating aspect of the media's fling with social hierarchy was the way they turned into Southerners. No one else uses words like ``aristocrat,'' ``genteel,'' and ``lady'' with such plummy abandon -- or uses them at all. The Yankee upper crust, according to Joseph Alsop, simply say ``nice people'' and let it go at that. Nor do they elevate females to the peerage; the preferred Northern word was ``gentlewoman'' until the last generation that used it died out. But the Southern lady lives, along with her entourage of cheekbone fanciers, diction coaches, and shintoists so hung up on maiden names that conversing with them is like opening a bank account.
The only Southern quality kick missing from the media's investiture of Willey was the ``fine-pored skin'' number.
``She has such fine-pored skin that you can see evra vein in huh body,'' Granny announced.
``Every vein?'' said my father. ``She must look like a doctor's chart.''
``Evra vein!''
Mere elitists don't carry on like this. Southerners have always been classists and now it seems that Americans of the better sort are, consciously or not, following suit. Even liberals can take only so much; a yearning for social hierarchy is natural to civilized people and ours has been frustrated for too long. Nowadays, all you have to do to pass for an aristocrat is wash your face and sit still. If the citizenry gets any commoner it won't be long before the cheekbone of an ass starts looking good to us, and given Bill Clinton's catholic taste in females, we may get to see one.

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