Free The Inspector-General of Misconception by Frank Moorhouse Page B

suffering.
    If you are above $50,000 a year in income you should shut up and suffer in silence.
    It is perhaps expressed best in what our mother said when we complained as a child, ‘Think of those at sea in ships.’
    But angst is the pain of being alive and that afflicts all.
    It is also implied by much arts criticism that this middle class has no rightful claim to be the content of art.
    Yet, any knowledge of those who are materially well-off or who have social status reveals that, yes, they can suffer. They can suffer all the things that are deepest in the human condition.
    In fact, they are also vulnerable to something that the‘poor’ are not. They are vulnerable to loss of their status, wealth and comfort which may not be a loss to which we grant great sympathy, but which is nevertheless real, and often the proper stuff of art (Lear, for example).
    Further, the use of the term also implies a value and behaviour pattern.
    Perhaps those who use it are using ‘class’ as Weber used it, which was about ‘life chances’ which the private school is supposed to give?
    A writer in the Sunday Age seems to feel that something can be generalised from a private school education. Talking of one of the characters in a play Honour by Joanna Murray-Smith, he says, ‘With a ring in her nose, she’s a combination of the studied streetwise and the private school’. (Hibberd’s comments above were also from a review of this fine play.)
    This Office would have to be convinced by further evidence that the private school education, in the long run , does increase ‘life chances’ in this country. The contrary may well be true because of the way the non-private school world treats such elitist education with suspicion – but we won’t get into that.
    Finding: Our Office feels that the expression ‘middle class’ is best avoided in journalism and conversation with the hope that more meaningful expressions of social division and status might emerge. The tired expressions ‘blue collar’ and ‘white collar’ can also go.
    There may be no meaningful terms for broad social divisions in Australia. At least, none that are in general use.
    Another problem before The Office is with the idea of ‘suits’ as in ‘little men in suits’.
    â€˜Our planners are little men in grey suits who … have given us Darling Harbour and The Rocks, planning disasters …’ ( Sydney Morning Herald ) but readers will have read hundreds of other examples of the use of the term.
    â€˜The suits’ is another contemptuous social category meaning mindless males in powerful positions.
    We suppose it does encompass women in power, although no derisive category has emerged except perhaps ‘femocrats’ and the expression ‘power dressing’ when describing the dress of some women who have positions of authority.
    It is thought to follow that people in these occupations requiring the wearing of suits are slaves to convention and to their masters, or that they are limited imaginatively or theoretically by their occupations or their way of dressing.
    Hence, writers and people in the arts who avoid ties and suits for fear they will be identified as a ‘suit’.
    An historical by-note: Neville Chamberlain in 1936 prepared a list of improvement of tone for Edward VIII upon his accession to the throne. This included the wearing of darker suits by the King.
    Accountants and bank clerks especially are seen unfairly as exemplifying this suited greyness of life. But Einstein always wore a suit.
    Older women are dismissed as a category when called the ‘blue rinse brigade’. That there are women who,when their hair turns grey, do dye it blue tells us nothing about these women.
    Women with blue rinse in their hair will be found in further education – the arts, administration, and everywhere else in society.
    Nothing much follows from having