Today, that critic of the middle class John Updike died. Lung cancer did him in at 76. That has left an opening for a fresh voice to observe America's middle class, at least what's left of it.
Probably that voice won't communicate in books, the way Updike did with his "Rabbit" series. The voice will come through on the web in blogging, tweets, podcasts, and maybe email blasts.
Do I have fantasies about being that voice? Not really. I don't understand the middle class. Never did. Somehow I migrated right from lower middle class aka white trash in Jersey City, New Jersey to the upper middle class and, at least in values, back to ethos of the blue collar. Here's my story on that flight back to my working-class roots Download CUsersjasneDocumentsjg. Another insightful deconstruction of the values of the blue collar is "Limbo" by Alfred Lubrano.
From what I've observed of the middle class, perhaps it's just as well it's vanishing in America. It was an expensive way of life, plus a definite soul-killer. And it wasn't only the Rabbits who wound up needing salvation and not finding it.
In college in the mid 1960s, at the-then women's Roman Catholic Seton Hill, I bore witness to vibrant girls twisting themselves into dead-eyed women. They did that in order to snag a proposal by first semester senior year from one of those awful Rabbits Updike castigated in his books. Over the years I ran into them. They had gone from dead-eyed to dead-souled. Yeah, all over.
Probably I kept myself fat in order to keep out of all that. A first-generation college in my family, I lacked the confidence and strength to buck the system directly. As yet, I haven't married. Maybe I'm afraid that I will still wind up with a twice-fried Rabbit, left over from a schoolmate's first marriage. Predictably, they dumped or were dumped by Rabbit 1.0 to simply replicate the spiritual tragedy with Rabbit 2.0.
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