Letter from America

There are nine American classes, with subtle differences in dress

‘Americans can wear golf shorts in the street and not feel embarrassed’

I bumped into my English neighbour at the Stop ’n’ Shop – so we bumped elbows and stepped outside the supermarket to chat where the air was clearer.

Two days earlier, coronavirus had arrived in Massachusetts at Wellesley, an upmarket dormitory town west of Boston – best known for a great Turkish barbecue joint and the women’s college where Hillary Clinton delivered the Commencement address of 1969 in the key of Patty Hearst.

My friend confessed to hoarding three jars of Marmite. These are imported and cost as much per pound as gold bullion. It was getting serious.

So far, ours was a white-collar pandemic. The COVID-19 culprits had all attended the same strategy conference at Biogen, an enormously valuable but strangely low-profile biotech multinational. Air miles had been accrued, cheeks brushed and power-hugs administered, and hands shaken vigorously while the hand-shakers maintained firm eye contact.

This news caused considerable distress in our social circles. Until then, we’d all quietly hoped that coronavirus was a disease of the poor and huddled, and that the higher your social class, the lower your exposure. Now it seemed you could catch it from leaning in: Sandberg’s Syndrome.

American being a land of willed illusions, it is considered unpatriotic to talk of class. There’s also not enough time to talk about it, because the American speciality is race.

Unlike race, class is hard to spot in America. ‘The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit,’ George Orwell wrote in Down and Out in Paris and London. I don’t believe this was largely true in London or Paris in 1933, and it’s still not largely true in those cities now.

It was and is, though, largely true then and now in America, where fortunes are made and lost faster, where the middle class stretches from sea to shining sea, and where the average millionaire wears golf pants.

These are not an item of underwear. They are ultra-thin, sweat-wicking trousers, made of polyfibrous plastic but cut to look like chinos, and I recommend them for the humid months. Our president, a patriotically average millionaire, wears these putting pants whenever he disports himself on the greens. In this, Donald Trump is what Joseph Conrad would have called a ‘secret sharer’ with his mortal enemy, the avid golfer Barack Obama.

This would mean more, were it not that all males of the Biogen classes possess several pairs and sedulously play golf in them, because golf offers opportunities for professional advancement in America akin to those that lunchtime drinking once did in Britain.

‘You know you’re an American when you can wear golf shorts in the street and not feel embarrassed,’ a native advised me. I possess several pairs, yet I have never played golf in my life. Then again, the Americans collect pairs of sneakers, and most of them are too fat to walk.

Naturally there are as many classes in America as you’d like. In Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (1983), historian Paul Fussell identified a nine-tier class system in three layers. At the bottom are the destitute and the ‘out of sight’ – not to be confused with the ‘outtasight’ One Per Cent whom we quite admire. The middle class contains four sub-classes: Low-, Middle- and High-proletarian and Middle-middle. The top strata are Upper-middle, Upper and Top out-of-sight. The key marker here is less the golf pant, which is ubiquitous from the Low-proletarian upwards, and more the gilet, the padded vest worn by men with no arms and Dominic Cummings.

The natural habitat of the American gilet overlaps with that of the fleece vest. But, as Karl Marx would have written had he been a golfer, the gilet class is a wolfish predator upon the flock of fleece-wearers. Bill Gates wears an L L Bean fleece vest as the symbol of his empathetic Middle-middleness. I, his choice of fleece says, order my private jets by mail-order catalogue too.

The fleece vest is ubiquitous commuter wear among office workers. The Patagonia fleece monogrammed with the company name became such a symbol of Wall Street, and Wall Street so universally detested by the Middles, that Patagonia recently stopped monogramming. This seems unfair to the fleece-wearers. The real power lies with the gilet class. We know that because they have no need of the monogram.

In the Stop ’n’ Shop car park, my English friend and I wonder whether the Americans will pull together because of coronavirus. The sight of hordes of shoppers loading supplies into their cars suggests otherwise. She reminds me that in the panic after 9/11, two members of our Upper-biogen class bought mopeds, to beat the traffic if there was an exodus from the city – like Roman Holiday, but with chemical weapons. His ’n’ hers Vespas. Now that’s class.