01.19.05
Lower-upper-middlebrow, Or: Consider your class-consciousness raised

In the fall of 1998, my junior year, I transferred to Hunter College and started taking state-mandated liberal arts classes. (None of this passing off The History of Musical Theater as a humanities course here, young lady!) I signed up for Sociology 101 and was immediately disappointed in my horrible and stupid hippie professor.

He was armed with a white-man afro, rambling anecdotes about "the 60's, man", and several annoying catchphrases, including:

1. "Yeah, maybe some of us like to smoke a little grass every now and then..."

2, "(Fill in the blank) turned me on to (fill in the blank)"

(i.e.: "Fred Weintraub was the one that turned me on to Bob Dylan." or "Being really stoned turned me on to tacos.")

3. "Why don't you come down during office hours so I can rap at ya?"

Anyway, he pretty much blew his chance to convince me that I should use sociology for good instead of evil.

I remember specifically one exercise he had us do from our textbooks, where we were to answer a series of questions and plot the results on a chart to find out where we fell on the "class-taste index". The scale ranged from "Elite-class taste" down to "Outsider-class taste" (presupposing that your main interests are sitting on subway vents and asking people for spare change).

Already cranky and painfully class-conscious after spending 2 years at NYU, I wasn't about to stand up in front of the class and be exposed as hopelessly low-brow, condemned to a life watching pro wrestling and drinking beer out of a can, so I was uncharacteristically argumentative.

He came around to each of our work groups with the answer-key. He declared me to have "Upper-middle-class taste".

"I do not."

I didn't know what he was talking about, but I pressed on: "You can't determine from 50 questions all of my likes and dislikes and what kind of life I'm destined to live."

He looked back down at he answer key, then asked, "You enjoy drinking scotch and reading The New Yorker, don't you?"

Fine. I can't argue with science. Not even stupid hippie science.