Class Will Tell
SCHULMAN, SAM
Class Will Tell Why the commentariat honors Bill Ayers as a respectable member of the upper middle class and fi nds Sarah Palin contemptible BY SAM SCHULMAN Pour yourself a Johnnie Walker...
...But what the classes think is a matter to which the GOP standard-bearers are sadly but nobly indifferent...
...But the undecided voters who will determine the winner are no longer interested in race or sex...
...McCain and Palin have each refused, by sheer cussedness, to fulfi ll the social expectations of others...
...Biden practiced for years in front of a mirror to overcome his childhood stutter...
...Receiving all those services in exchange for a partially deductible maintenance fee and a Christmas tip, we don’t much miss the small matter of McCain’s authentic service to his country...
...Palin had to take charge when the country club Republicans running Alaska became corrupt and lazy, Crichton accepts his new role calmly and saves the family...
...In the sex and race eras, it would have worked nicely...
...Instead, she should learn from watching herself as she ought to be...
...In the play, but not in Alaska, there is a neatly ironic conclusion...
...Richard Stern couldn’t muster an intimacy with their unattainable world—Skull & Bones, the Elizabeth Islands, wind-surfi ng, ancestral summer compounds...
...Being the fi rst in one’s family to adopt liberal political sentiments or move to New York City means a step into the middle class, for most Americans, and an increase in social status...
...Katie is a respectable girl with a grating accent who serves in the household of a great Minnesota political dynasty, headed by matriarch Ethel Barrymore...
...This sort of r?sum...
...Then it was going to be about race...
...She wants to be the best man, not just in Alaska, but even in America itself...
...John McCain speaks about service and sacrifi ce, and how he wore our nation’s uniform, as if we want to hear about such things...
...Back in London, nature’s aristocrat yields silently to social order...
...The Bushes, Kerry, and Gore were all true American aristocrats, with a long lineage, distinguished ancestors, prep-school educations and tastes...
...Which ticket best expresses the values and tastes of the upper-middleclass— and captivates the rest of us who follow the lead of the upper-middles...
...There is nothing more anxious-making than striving to create taste for the classes, not masses, or even to keep up with it...
...The class argument is why the Bill Ayers strategy won’t do...
...How do we square our egalitarian self-conceit with a liveried doorman...
...While Palin threatens class solidarity, Obama is emollient...
...Palin, to our cost, refuses to play Crichton this way...
...This may make them poison to undecideds who suffer, more than most, from class anxiety...
...Paula Throckmorton-Zakaria fi nds the spirit of service right at home in Manhattan: We may not have a ‘‘servant’’ class in the strict Victorian sense, but a “service” class we have indeed, and it is serving us...
...And it can thus be pretty easy for us, if we just pull the right lever...
...Obama wrote his own life, and then wrote it again...
...The experience didn’t equip us to recognize the real thing...
...This makes her audience not tearful, but profoundly uncomfortable from social anxiety...
...Biden’s background is comfy: high school quarterback not racing skipper, summers on Rehoboth Beach not Gibson Island...
...I, my children, and perhaps the Sulzberger and Couric children spent years passing through doors opened by uniformed, epauletted men on the way to private schools that were proud to teach an ethic of service...
...In J.M...
...There is no cure, but there is an etiology...
...More extreme political radicalism lifts one a step or two higher...
...Carefully, Stern engages with the glamorous couple on equal terms, before judging them: At dinner, thirty-eight years later, Ayers and Dohrn did not seem to hold [my criticism of the 1970 University of Chicago student uprising] against me, and I didn’t hold their fi ery and criminally violent behavior against them...
...The Republicans, alas, are stuck with this election’s true and unrepentant revolutionaries...
...But no longer...
...Class Will Tell Why the commentariat honors Bill Ayers as a respectable member of the upper middle class and fi nds Sarah Palin contemptible BY SAM SCHULMAN Pour yourself a Johnnie Walker Black and remember...
...But the man who may be president is cleverer still...
...LADY MARY: Then there’s something wrong with England...
...Katie knew when to resume her proper place—but Sarah refuses to do so...
...CRICHTON: My lady, not even from you can I listen to a word against England...
...Palin emerged from the tutelage of local fi gures and rose to be their equal—but then went on to defeat her GOP antagonists at the polls, save her party in Alaska, and become a competent governor...
...Unable to comprehend how Palin could have outpaced the Wasilla gentry, poor Scheiber clings for dear life to these sad fragments of class dignity...
...As in Chekhov’s wonderful story “Old Age,” time had planed down the sharp edges and brought one-time antagonists into each others’ arms...
...The desperate opposition party runs Katie against Cotten, an act of l?se-majest...
...Here, the upper-middleclass defi cit gets worse...
...She rose by refusing to accept the limitations of her proper station in life...
...We dreamed we would atone for slavery and the Berlin Airlift, impress Europe and charm the Arab world...
...The presidential campaign was going to be about sex—the sex of the inevitable winning candidate...
...But this year, what makes class so important is how very close so many of us are to the upper-middle-class characters on offer on the Democrat ticket...
...Ayers in 1970...
...Ayers did go to jail rather than implicate in the execution murders of several cops, enjoys that distinction...
...Now mainstream Chicago regards Ayers as rehabilitated— but why...
...He hasn’t, like Chuck Colson, repented, or paid his debt to society by serving a prison term...
...Revolutionary violence is the only way,” said the future Mrs...
...They are thus associated with the lower classes, whose shoulders are required for physical work...
...On the other hand, what can McCain and Palin offer except their two personal histories of struggle...
...Obama’s longtime working collaboration with the radical educational theorist and retired terrorist would dramatize his carefully but hastily discarded political radicalism...
...She causes a sensation...
...They attempted to kill, and celebrated the killings of others (like Charles Manson’s victims and the murder of any number of cops), to set an example for the less privileged...
...It’s that she won’t...
...Scheiber spoke to various people from Palin’s past, all of whom have two things in common: Every one of them is smarter than Palin and none of them has been heard of since their encounter with her...
...The little group is rescued...
...Carefully composed, Obama holds the upper-middle class in his steady hands, and has no need of Stern’s help to assure our anxious electorate that he will not shock their class sensibilities...
...The infl uential section of our upper-middle class, which lives in media centers, does, of course, have an understanding of the ethic of service, and a special familiarity with men in uniforms decorated with epaulets...
...We’ve known that our job is to lead white kids to armed revolution...
...Socially, they were nowhere...
...Barrie’s hit play of 1902, an aristocratic household—master, butler, tweenie, and all—is shipwrecked on a desert island...
...The more urbane members of the Hyde Park community are cleverer than their Wasilla counterparts and believe that they have captured Obama for their class—just as Richard Stern persuades himself that the still-radical couple he dines with are merely Unitarians in a hurry...
...She notoriously strikes the wrong class note on a thousand media keyboards with what Andrew Sullivan calls gallantly “Sarah Palin’s cocktail waitress act...
...Katie, though, realizes that her place is not in the Senate, but as the bride of the new senator, guiding him from behind the scenes...
...The former lovers, back to buttling and being bride of the year, confront one another in a little scene that for generations induced tears in its audiences: LADY MARY: Do you despise me, Crichton...
...which enrages Miss Barrymore—then wins her respect...
...The struggle to do so is etched in the lines of Tina Brown’s face...
...No wonder Paula Throckmorton-Zakaria’s husband is sore at her: “Is it too much to ask that she come to realize that she wants, in that wonderful phrase in American politics, ‘to spend more time with her family?’ ” Even better, Governor Palin, think of yourself as the Admirable Crichton...
...On the other hand, there were the masses of students who merely marched and fl ashed the peace sign...
...They also open the door...
...Class will always trump politics...
...Scheiber’s pet specimen among what he calls “the more urbane members of the community” is a Dartmouth graduate who reads Civil War histories, self-published a book, and not only does but “savors” the New York Times crossword puzzle...
...Noam Scheiber has a particularly grave case...
...Please...
...The man who could never tell a lie makes no answer...
...In the state of nature, all discover that the butler, Crichton, is the true leader...
...Tens of thousands have learned that protest and marches don’t do it...
...The military makes much of epaulets, betraying instantly its prole associations...
...His reward is the promise of Lady Mary’s love...
...Epaulets emphasize the shoulders...
...But do not despise the undecideds...
...That looks like repentance...
...Stern, a novelist and a long-serving University of Chicago English professor, reassures us: I’ve been to three or four small dinner parties with Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, once hailed as the Weathermen’s Dolores Ib?rruri (“La Pasionaria”), a fi ery, beautiful muse...
...Not easily...
...What makes the Ayerses respectable is purely a matter of uppermiddleclass solidarity...
...The anti-Ayers publicists are quite right about Ayers’s malignity and Obama’s connivance...
...Some will remember Loretta Young’s Oscar-winning portrayal of Katie, The Farmer’s Daughter, in the tearjerker of 1947...
...CRICHTON: On an island, my lady, perhaps...
...If one were to pick out one real achievement in Senator Obama’s life, it is to show us that attaining his status has been pretty easy for him...
...Think of David Brooks, Christopher Buckley, David Frum, Peggy Noonan, and George Will...
...Mere achievement gets us nowhere...
...Dohrn is still attractive, while Ayers maintains an adolescent fi zzle in his sexagenarian bones...
...If Palin wants to pal around with the Throck mortonZakarias, she is wasting her time memorizing classic 19thcentury Supreme Court decisions (Katie Couric isn’t going to give her a mulligan...
...You are the best man among us...
...The son and heir, Joseph Cotten, is about to step into his father’s Senate seat in an uncontested election, until Katie speaks up at a public meeting...
...Sadly she is quite the opposite—one of nature’s noblewomen...
...If only Palin were really as trashy as Sullivan thinks she is...
...And what about Sarah Palin...
...Even conservatives can contract Scheiber Syndrome...
...The symptoms...
...But in my demographic slice of country, we are a little confl icted about such things as struggle, service, uniforms, and sacrifi ce...
...You can see the ranks close around them in the texture of Richard Stern’s elegant prose...
...Sam Schulman, a writer in Virginia, is publishing director of the American...
...For non-New Yorkers, doormen are the guys who carry the bags, organize the packages and tell you who stopped by to see your 15-year-old while you were out...
...But the problem is not that the governor can’t conform to upper-middle-class norms...
...Stern wants us to hear a mellow Chekhovian tone in their lives (and his prose...
...This is the fi rst election since 1996 and only the second since 1984 that has not offered the voters at least one specimen, and sometimes a d?gustation of several, upper-class Americans...
...Just as The Morley family butler, Clancy (Charles Bickford), watches over Katie (Loretta Young) bringing breakfast to the would-be senator Glenn Morley (Joseph Cotten) in The Farmer’s Daughter (1947...
...Curiously amplifi ed, obsessively repeated, sometimes elaborately stage-whispered doubts about the Republican ticket...
...In his book Class, Paul Fussell hypothesized that upper-middle-class men prefer naturalshoulder jackets because men’s shoulders are a secondary sexual characteristic...
...she is despised for continuing to do so...
...They’d raised the child of a Weatherman who’d been jailed, they were taking care of Bernardine’s ill mother, they were doing many things educated community activists were doing...
...They are looking at social class...
...Scheiber’s attempt to understand Sarah Palin, detailed in the New Republic, took him all the way to Wasilla, as strange to him as Ethiopia to Evelyn Waugh...
...but in England, no...
...Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn became Sixties royalty not because of the status of the Ayers family in Chicago, but because of their relish for violence...
...And even behind Obama’s fi ery mentors, there is an upper-middle-class background, attainable, imitable, and soothing...
...Obama and his surprising choice for vice president have spent most of their career working on their own images, smoothing out the rough edges, trying out devices, rhetorical and cosmetic, to make the nicer sort of people feel comfortable with them...
...He doesn’t even enjoy the prestige of a Clinton presidential pardon...
...All share a dreadful secret—their writing is driven by an anxiety to be tastemakers to the gentry, not merely thinkers and entertainers...
...wouldn’t get your niece an unpaid internship on L Street—but for a Rhodes Scholar lost in Alaska, the Dartmouth degree, the Civil War buffery, the Times crossword puzzle all take on huge signifi cance...
...As the Ayerses’ social equal, Stern can estimate them fairly...
...That was the shock of the Kent State massacre—the veteran martyrs of Harvard’s University Hall and Columbia’s Low Library wondered that such a terrible and authentic event could have taken place at a far-away state school to people of whom we knew nothing...
...As far as I know, Ayers and Dohrn are loyal to the selves which led both of them to jail (though not for long), but they were busy doing other things, useful things, Ayers as educator, Dohrn as a legal counselor...
...America’s “offi cer class” does not generally include career military offi cers...
...So far the story traces Palin’s trajectory...
...But when they try to explain what Ayers has done in the past and still wants to do—turn schools into nurseries of revolution, make leftist views a condition for becoming a teacher, promote dictatorship, and glorify violence—they injure not help their cause...
...Throckmorton-Zakaria’s husband, Fareed Zakaria, uses a rare one-word sentence to make his entire argument against her: “Palin Is Ready...
...What the Ayerses now teach, think, and do hardly matters as long as they observe good form, the form of “educated community activists...
...Perhaps, but in his moral reasoning I hear Oscar Wilde’s Cecily Cardew, in The Importance of Being Earnest, observing that the Ayerses “have been eating muffi ns...
...COURTESY EVERETT the counterjumping Mrs...
...Susan Rosenberg, a fellow Weatherman for whom Mrs...
Vol. 14 • October 2008 • No. 7
