Jamie Does All the Heavy Lifting...

But then again, he's a true prol--has a job and everything. I'm a gone-soft, used-to-be-prol who always thought he would make it into the bourgeoisie but somehow stay true to his humble roots. But you know what Joe Strummer says: you can throw away all your he-man theories once you've lost that grubby feeling. Of course, he was talking about fucking and he was spot-on: you can't fuck if your hands ain't dirty...look at Viagra. It's a crutch for limp-dick desk jockeys. But the sentiment holds, I think, for larger questions of what it means to be working class or middle class. Perhaps the fact that he can't fuck is all you really need to know about somebody in a button-down.

Anyway, to answer an only marginally related question, Jamie, every institution that calls itself a "university" (and every bumfuck college in America is seemingly rushing to get a nursing/business/paralegal program just so it can do that very thing) requires students to carry insurance. UNC did; though God bless 'em, the Original Public University In America charged next to nothing for its self-funded student health program and still provided excellent benefits. Others, like my current school, which also owns the student insurance concern, appear to be in it for the money alone: it's about $800 a year and provides almost no real coverage, plus you have to pay an additional "health fee" that covers the services you really DO use, like seeing a doctor for a routine checkup. Thus, insurance merely satisfies the requirement for enrollment--they're preying upon your inability to get health insurance before you have to register for classes. Still others use third-party insurers, like the University of Chicago does, which allows the U. to claim no knowledge of the malfeasance of the insurance company it chose to represent its students.

Clearly, this is all about money. But, like tuition and fees, Jamie is entirely correct that universities are squeezing the working class out of their student pools. This is also not accidental, I suspect, but I have no direct proof of a class bias except to note anecdotally (and hence, without weight) that the whole project of higher education willfully avoids the interrogation of class relations in this country. Politics does, as the dumbass conservatives will maintain (equally anecdotally), find its way into the classroom, but it is a classless politics that merely suggests, rather than argues against, the existence of inequality or the failure of the social contract in America. Conservative professors, for their part, seem to only want to argue economics, and take no part whatever in the questions of A) reality or following from that, B) class.

One could argue, I suppose, that there are so fucking goddamn many colleges and universities in the US today that it does not matter at the moment that many of the best and largest are creating atmospheres deadly to less affluent students or, to put it another way, students who just want to learn, not drink for four years, snatch an MBA or journalism degree, and get the fuck out. Unfortunately, the small schools are the cutting edge of this jihad against knowledge, not the poor (ha!) cousins of the better-known institutions.

So back to the basic question: where is a poor boy to go? Well, much as it stings, it looks evermore like the only permitted destination is the same as it was before 1945 and the GI Bill: back to the workaday grind. Concurrent with this push to exclude poor kids from higher education (and the other playgrounds of the rich that were temporarily opened to a wider segment of the populace by our quickly-dying social welfare programs--politics, business, Wall Street, the CEO's office) is a disgusting and hateful ethos of the nobility of the working class. Even those trusty lefties in the academy are spouting it: labor historians think they are doing us a big fucking favor by building up their subjects, either as martyrs to the cause of equality or as tragic heroes caught up in the machinery of cold capitalism, but the result is the same: workers are noble.

No. They. Fucking. Are. Not.


Workers are just like other people: small, petty, stupid, drunk, violent, exploitive; but also amiable, caring, intelligent, protective, and generous. But their work doesn't make it so--the fact of LIFE, of their HUMANITY makes it so! Anyone who would argue otherwise is a fool. Working with your hands is not ennobling--even though it may be quite fulfilling--it's degrading and destructive. Your body wears out, your mind goes blank, your pride takes a beating. You don't walk tall at the end of the day--how can you when you just got assfucked by everybody you met today? And then you get to go home (if you have a home) and hear all about Smirky the Chimp and his plans for an ownership society. It's enough to make you go on a rampage. But, alas, you're too tired from working--you don't have all the free time of the dipshit eggheads who work in offices or sit in classrooms and spout emptily about the plight of the poor, noble worker. You got a family to feed, motherfucker. You're the backbone of America, and just like all the poor steelworkers Andy Carnegie wanted to give libraries to, your back is broken and you don't feel a whole lot like picking up a fucking book tonight. Thanks for fuckin' nothing, dickhead. How about a college education for my kids?

Sure. Do they have insurance?