• Lots of ways to calculate risk and reward.

• Lots of ways to calculate risk and reward. In turn, our risk models derive from our experience and our personalities. The rightist TV show 20/20 had a segment on risk-taking kids (12-9-05). Evidently the brain chemistry of some daredevil stunt riders, snow boarders, and bungee jumpers is a little different from average; these folks need constant stimulation, even at the cost of scattered teeth, broken bones, and ruptured spleens. (I wonder if this kind of risk-taking carries over into political projects. I suspect the attraction of extreme sports is not the risk itself as much as the sheer physical stimulation. If adrenalin is the kick, a frantic campaign for Karl Rove would be just as thrilling, and a lot more profitable than, say, organizing among soldiers or the gangs not listed on stock exchanges.) People like me, on the other hand, spend much of their time avoiding or damping down sensory overloads.

On the other hand, even kids who start with similar wiring might end up with very different risk behavior, depending on the success of early dealings with adults.

Here in the land of the free our ideas of what's possible vary extravagantly, even among people of similar circumstances. Some of the kids in my GED classes planned to become stockbrokers, others basketball stars, even as others could not imagine going to community college, or demanding that their sex partners use condoms. What are the chances of getting AIDS, getting shot, making it big on YouTube; overthrowing the government? Do we make our opportunities or do they come out of the blue, attending or skipping over each person randomly, for us to seize or lose in an instant? How we answer these questions --the stories we tell ourselves-- determine not only our personal strategies but our political commitments as well.


*~*~*~* ~*~*~*~* Class is a set of expectations and explanations. *~*~*~* ~*~*~*~*~*

One of the most consistently powerful tools for understanding how we operate is the idea of class: the notion that we make political choices based on our social situtation. We often think of class as an artifact of our roles in the economy, but it's much more. In effect, class is the set of expectations and expected behaviors derived from our parents' or grandparents' role in the economy, backed by quasi-religious explanations of our rightful place in the world. Class is a far better predictor of our politics than simple measures of income or occupation, because we hold class attitudes long after their original basis is gone. Take the tales of middle class folks fallen on hard times among hard types, yet retaining their genteel or snooty ways; think Brando hollering "Stella!" These are practically staples of our national narrative. This is not to say that holding onto old values is necessarily irrational; carefully preserved gentility may indeed be a valued ingredient in some cross-class marriages. Others successfully trim their expectations to new circumstances.

I first realized the centrality of class to political action when I figured out that the guys I hung out with as a young adult had a very different take on the world than I did. We went to the same schools, listened to the same music, took the same drugs. We shared adventures and privileges and life prospects. Some of my friends were politically active much before I was. But we ended up with very different understandings as we grew into our parents' expectations.

There's a good commercial expression of this in the romance-on-the-other-side-of-the-tracks movies. You know, rich boy or girl meets poor boy or girl, fall in love, fight, and do or do not triumph over their class differences. We like these stories because, face it, as far as Halliburton can see we all grew up on the wrong side of the tracks. We would love to have a prince or princess sweep us away to the palace. We also know it ain't gonna happen. O sure, the prince may gaze into my eyes and see the genuine authentic salt of the earth kind of person I am, so fresh and unspoiled, so easy to please compared to those affected snobs he is forced to fellate or play polo with, but I know deep down he's never going to invite to his castle my crazy mom and cousin Erica the oxycontin entrepreneur. It's not that one's class must be the same as one's true self-interest (whatever that is), but that it is a very powerful story of self-interest.

The reality of class poses a bit of a dilemma for Halliburton. While educating the rich to their class obligations --remember Junior's line about the Haves and the Have-Mores in Moore's Iraq movie?-- it also has to pretend to the rest of us that there is no such thing as class. Thus we get the persistent whimper of GOP robber barons about "class warfare" by the Democrats (!), how it hurts their feelings and all.

In real life we see class behavior all the time, despite massive official smokescreens. Quite possibly former Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney did not get a dime when the regime awarded Halliburton those billion-dollar no-bid contracts in the Persian Gulf and the post-Katrina Gulf coast. Playing rainmaker to his pals may not even have been the Dick's biggest consideration in going to war. It's just the first consideration, the taken-for-granted starting point. Of course what's good for the country is what's good for my company. Of course my pals will take care of me very generously later on. The rich steal without any more thought than they would give to dropping their underwear for the maid to launder whilst they campaign for legislation to send her back to whatever war- or free trade-convulsed country she came from.

That's how I think as well about my former Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Senate Majority leader, aka the Senator from Hospital Corporation of America. A few years back an article examined Frist's ties to HCA and exactly missed the point. It doesn't matter if, as he claimed (before the cockroaches of scandal started scuttling across the floor in 2005), he gave up his financial stake in the vast health care vendor. His brother ran the place for many years, his family had hundreds of millions invested, and Dr. Frist knows the business backwards and forwards. To pretend that he can fairly represent the interests of consumers against his own point of view, family loyalties and emotional stake is either wishful thinking or a dam' lie, depending on how charitable you want to be.

Class interest is more than just a matter of quarterly cash flow. It includes an explanation for why we are better off than some people and worse off than others-- and the answer is always our own virtue. It’s clear to me, for instance, that I could be just as rich as Pres. Cheney, but I’m too proud to lie and steal and kill. But I work hard for everything I own and if the average Bangladeshi doesn’t have 2 computers and a pension, well, she should have planned her life better. A part-time teacher and welfare client of my acquaintance is furious at her lot in life-- and blames factory workers for making more money than she does (perhaps she has in mind auto workers of two generations ago). It upsets the moral order.

Ultimately, class is a way of life that opens some options and forecloses others. The rich know very well, even if the rest of us sometimes do not, the value of sticking together over the long term. Plus, they know who they're sticking together against.

I've belabored the obvious because we don't talk much about class in this country, and too simply when we do.

In contrast, many others have written very accurately and insightfully about gender, so I'll do no more here than underline: sex roles are expectations we have set and can change. Probably my understanding of social expectations in general derives first from the work many folks have done analyzing gender.

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