Journal of Working-Class Studies | 2021
Giving Away the Game – Scattershot Notes on Social Class and Other Afflictions
Abstract
One of my earliest jobs was driving for an unregulated car service in New York.\xa0 In the days before Uber they were called ‘gypsy cabs.’\xa0 One night I found myself on the business end of a revolver.\xa0 Telling the tale to my dispatcher next day, he was staggeringly nonplussed.\xa0 ‘Ya gotta put up with a lot,’ he said, ‘when you’re tryin’ t’ get ahead.’\xa0 ‘Yeah,’ I replied, disgusted, ‘even gettin’ your head blown off.’\xa0 Some time later, another driver, an African-American in a similar scenario, didn’t make it, emphasizing how much higher the stakes for a person of color.\xa0 These are the real wages of work, I thought, and the rules of the game. \nMy dispatcher’s nonchalance bespoke how invested in the game he was; in a set of beliefs, assumptions, and animating myths that keep the wheel of fortune going.\xa0 Like the Monty Python skit about the collapsing tower, if too few invest in those myths, the entire edifice crumbles. \nThe following is a personal essay that attempts to navigate the game’s parameters - social class, aspiration, and its attendant neurosis - and the myths that animate such notions as ‘getting ahead,’ ‘climbing the ladder,’ and the ‘American Dream,’ my country’s main (ideological) export.\xa0 The approach is less theory-driven than empirical, phenomenological.\xa0 Hence the numbered sections, a style popularized by Wittgenstein, Herbert Read and others.\xa0 Here it doesn’t represent chronology so much as the elusive, episodic nature of the beast.\xa0