[BITList] Charles Murray’s ‘Coming Apart - The State of White America’ - NYTimes.com

[HUGH]

Mike,

I read : "I did not want my children to grow up only knowing other upper-middle-class kids like themselves,” said Mr. Murray, who has two children with Ms. Cox and two from his first marriage. “That was a very conscious worry shared by my work.” 
Life in Burkittsville, as he described it, approximates the small-town virtues he enjoyed growing up in Newton, Iowa, where, as the son of a manager at Maytag, he could mingle easily with the children of assembly-line workers. 

In Burkittsville, he said, he and his wife attend Quaker meetings and enjoy friendships with both other professionals and blue-collar tradespeople, whose travails he cited to counter the suggestion that the problems described in “Coming Apart” might have something to do with the disappearance of working-class jobs. 

Until the recession hit, Mr. Murray insisted, his blue-collar friends were eager to hire apprentices at good wages but struggled to find anyone willing to do the work. “They are looking at a marked deterioration in industriousness that is real and palpable,” he said."

Professionals; blue-collar tradespeople; mingle easily with children of assembly line workers; blue-collar friends hiring apprentices? What a patronising bunch - I can't relate to that world - little wonder the USA is in a mess.  In the Port Glasgow of my childhood there were still signs of a less egalitarian past - the big houses on the hills, though at most two still occupied as private homes - the smaller villas along Lilybank, still some of them occupied by lawyers, shopkeepers, teachers and shipyard managers.  But my father said of one of Lithgow's directors,  "I used to kick his arse when he was young,"  and that was probably true, for they grew up on the same short street down by the river, and both started in the shipyards as boys.  There was no sense of social class, and we all spoke the same language, all that is, bar the girls who had been to elocution lessons. None of us mingled with assembly-line workers, there being no assembly lines, and blue collars were never in fashion, even at work. James Lithgow was on first name terms with half his workforce, and his draughtsman father lived on the same short working class street (Port Glasgow had no long streets) as my riveter great grandfather.

Hugh.
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