Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

I’ve been reading more of Maza’s The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750-1850. I came upon her discussion of the phamplets that proliferated on the eve of the French Revolution. She discusses the various evils identified by phamphleteers. One was “An Essay on Privilege” by Abbé Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, which was the complement of another, earlier and far more famous essay, “What is the Third Estate?.” The latter essay became the voice of the revolution: “What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been hitherto in the political order? Nothing. What does it desire? To be something.”

(quick note: Maza is only making the claim re: France, so she wouldn’t much care about Germany. My bad for muddying things up by referencing something Carrol Cox said about the usage, “Yuppie.” Also, she’s aware that she’s being deliberately provocative. She’s also aware that the bourgeosie claimed to speak for all of mankind — and will deal with that argument. One thing that has me curious is her apparently uncontroversial claim that “Since the 1960s, the interpretation of the French Revolution as the triumph of a capitalist middle class has fallen on hard times, and today historians are arguing more than ever over whether what happened in France in the decade after 1789 should be viewed as a bourgeois revolution. One obvious question…has never been posed: did the revolutionary bourgeoisi, if such there was, ever identify itself?”

I am rather curious about that last claim. I’m not especially well-schooled in this literature, so I have no idea what she is talking about, no way to assess where she stands in relation to Marxist theory and, really?, don’t much care right now. I think Carrol’s right that, sometimes, bourgeois theory — like Thomas Laqueur’s work on sexuality, gender, and masturbation — can prove valuable. (and yes, Gary, I haven’t forgotten you. Nor have I forgotten Duncan! If either of you are reading anyway! :)

Anyway, onward to privilege. Maza writes:

Sieyès and his contemporaries were well aware of the etymological origin of the word “privilege,” which comes from the Latin for ‘private law.’ Privilege therefore represented much more than iniquitous taxation; it was the essence of a system in which different legalities, and therefore different “nations,” were allowed to coexist. Privilege destroys all patriotic feelings, wrote Sieyès, including an antisocial caste selfishness in the privilégié, who “thinks of himself and his colleagues as forming a separate order, a chosen nation within a nation.”

Which is pretty interesting. So often, when someone mentions the word privilege in a negative way, in order to reject discussions of white privilege or male privilege — or whatever — they immediately assume the usage that privilege has taken on more than two hundred years later: that you have a life of luxury. They think of it as meaning that you have wealth or something.

And the funny thing is, several times when reading this bridge we call home, I noticed that an author would describe someone or some group as “white, middle class, and privileged.” It jarred me. For instance, one author, Simona J. Hill, in the essay, “‘All I can Cook Is Crack on a Spoon’: A Sign for a New Generation of Feminists,” writes of her students as “white, upper middle class, suburban, privileged.”

Now, I don’t know where she stands with regard to concepts like privileged, but it bothered me that she’d used the word in a way that undermined any attempt to understand terms like “white privilege” and “male privilege”. It suggests, her usage, that “whiteness” “upper middle classness” and “suburbanness” are all social locations that can be separated from privilege — that whiteness does not imply privilege; that upper middle class does not imply privilege.

I think this etymology might be useful in trying to explain what the word means. I’m not quite sure how now, but taking up that them of a special “nation” within a “nation” — *that* I think is interesting. Particularly because, in this literature, the problem was that, because they were so narrowly focused on their own kinda people, they were a detriment to a common bound that was supposed to be shared by the French — at least according to these writers.

reading this morning, while waking up with my cuppa joe, I had a flash back to taking French class. I remembered Mrs. Briggs, who had us select a name for ourselves — either the french version of our first name or a name we selected if there was nothing like it. I chose Jeanne. I sat there on the veranda and I could remember sitting in that classroom, the way the light streamed into the window into a room half basement, half not — an extension built on to the high school because we needed more room. I was so pleased with the name at the time. Reading the name “Juliette” — Maza’s daughter I gather — I wondered: why didn’t I pick something more romantic? pretty? something more daring. Why Jeanne?

But I remember sitting in that room, excited to be taking the course. And then I remembered how utterly pissed my mother was that I was taking it at all. She’d wanted me to take Spanish — it was going to be the universal language she insisted. IT was going to be an important language, given our demographic future. It would be useful for jobs. It was all kinda things to my mother — Spanish — and I wasn’t having any of it. Why I wanted to take French, I cannot recall. Possibly because I’d had some exposure to something in the books I read as a kid? Because Paris sounded lovely. Spain? Mexico? They didn’t, to me, offer the excitement of a cosmopolitan, urban wonderland like Paris. Plus I was, obviously, enamored of the notions I’d gotten about France and their intellectuals. Already, by the eighth grade, coffee shops and cigarettes and mad arguing people appealed to me. I wanted me some of that.

But man. I’ve always said that my mother pushed us to be something she wasn’t: educated, upwardly mobile, career women. But that memory brought back just how much she did: in specific detail, cause I’d long forgotten the specifics, retaining only the general memory. I’m good at repressing.

Everything she suggested to me about what I ought to do for classes and extracurricular activities — freak, even her anger at my rejecting someone for a date! — was about doing things for my future. I can remember that she got Newsweek every week, and sat at the kitchen table in the corner every morning, smoking, drinking coffee, and reading. That’s where she probably got a lot of these ideas about what would be best for my future. I ought to ask her about that — but she’ll often laugh and say, “Shag, I just don’t remember that. You kids remember stuff I never remember — and don’t remember the things I do!”

And then there was the fact that my dad worked as a chief paper boy and mom delivered papers, we always had free copies of the local paper (afternoon), the morning city paper for the small city to our north, and the NY Times, all of which she also read. And I learned to pore over the Sunday Times every Sunday morning, just as she did. When my step father came into the picture, I was exposed to even more of this cultcha stuff.

I told R this morning that I was going to go to France for my vacation. This a.m. the thought was that both of us would go, something we’d talked about often. This evening, that’s all changed: I’ve asked him to leave.

Didn’t expect that, didja? Neither did I.