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You could not shock her more than she shocks me;
Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.
It makes me most uncomfortable to see
An English spinster of the middle class
Describe the amorous effects of "brass,"
Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety
The economic basis of society.
--
W. H. Auden, Letter to Lord Byron (1936), lines 113–119

 

Jane Austen

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"This sucks on so many levels." — Dialogue from "Jason X" Rare for a movie to so frankly describe itself. "Jason X" sucks on the levels of storytelling, character development, suspense, special effects, originality, punctuation, neatness and aptness of thought.

 

Roger Ebert

 

The great goal of the backlash is to nurture a cultural class war, and the first step in doing so, as we have seen, is to deny the economic basis of social class. After all, you can hardly deride liberals as society’s "elite" or present the GOP as the party of the common man if you acknowledge the existence of the corporate world — the power that creates the nation’s real elite, that dominates its real class system, and that wields the Republican Party as its personal political system.

 

Thomas Frank

 

The ultimate "causes of price" - to use a Classical term - lie deeply embedded in the psychology and techniques of mankind and his environment, and are as manifold as the sands of the sea. All economic analysis is an attempt to classify these manifold causes, to sort them out into categories of discourse that our limited minds can handle, and so to perceive the unity of structural relationship which both unites and separates the manifoldness. Our concepts of "demand" and "supply" are such broad categories. In whatever sense they are used, they are not ultimate determinants of anything, but they are convenient channels through which we can classify and describe the effects of the multitude of determinants of the system of economic magnitude.

 

Kenneth Boulding

 

By default, we have created a "system" of nursing-home care for the aged in which middle-class people pay exorbitant rates to for-profit nursing-home entrepreneurs - and then when private resources are consumed and the patient qualifies as a pauper, the nursing home begins billing Medicaid. This is precisely the antithesis of social citizenship; instead of the poor being accorded the dignity associated with the middle class, equality of treatment is achieved by making the middle class undergo pauperization.

 

Robert Kuttner

 

So that's my home town, and I come from a perfectly ordinary working-class family; and in fact, I didn't really meet middle-class people until I went to university. It was quite a shock, really. People were saying things like 'Well, I was always going to end up doing English, because I was brought up surrounded by books - brought up in a house full of books'; and I'd think 'Yes, so was I; but they were full of Green Shield stamps'. I suppose we could have swapped them for books, but we had our eye on a twin-tub.

 

Linda Smith