A Signal Difference, between us English and French** speaking North Americans, and the Englishmen and Frenchmen whose Loins we spring from,

is that we, neither the Canucks nor the Yanks on this side of the Pond, simply don't get what "Class" is all about.  I have read several college-level tutelaries of Marxism (which, to my everlasting surprise, actually is [or is officially considered to be] a subject which is taught at University) which address the fundamental difficulty of persuading Canadian and American youths that social (indeed socioeconomic) classes exist, and that they belong to them (in whatever sense you wish to take this).  Interestingly, no matter what threats or promised rewards are deployed by their would-be professors of Marxism, a significant number of young Americans and Canadians remain unpersuaded--and presumably can never achieve academic grade point credit in a subject whose basic tenet(s) they find  absurd and unintelligible.  And I may say that, while I never enrolled in a class in Marxism at University, my several attempts at enrolling in Women's Studies classes were similarly baffling.

One of the most captivating discoveries, for me, in the last ten years of my life has been the astonishing revelation that I am  a direct, patrilinear and matrilinear descendant of the first White Americans who arrived in America on the good ships Mayflower (in 1620) and Little James (in 1623). Entirely unanticipated has been the discovery that my father's (and great-grandmama's) family has a written, and a legal, history dating back some 400 years--and more if you dig back into their apparent origins on the borders of Sherwood Forest in the 16th century.  What Protestants! Which means that neither they nor I can claim thereby to be aristocrats--but, rather, as is seen somewhat nakedly in the Mayflower Compact, men (and just behind them, women) of no class as such, and with no name for themselves, or for the necessary business of living in the world and governing themselves:  "Congregationalists" by default, because congregations of Protestant Christians were their primary political/economic core groups, although their preferred name for themselves was "Saints."  They might as well have called themselves "obstinately rhotic."

Anyway, what leaps out at me from the early history of my ancestors in this country--from the first judgments and decisions of wise (and learnèd) William Bradford, and even before--is the de facto emancipation and enfranchisement of children (and women), allowing them from a very early age to earn their own keep and to keep what they earned; creating, along with compulsory primary education, in effect, a volatile, affluent, child-centered society, which two centuries later was to win the indignant disapproval of Frances ("Fanny," which in her day did not mean "cunt") Trollope in her animadversions on the (lack of) Manners of Americans.




**I should say perhaps that I know so much about rude Québécois French because a couple of my favorite authors of homosexual (written) pornography write in this curiously vigorous, somewhat ungrammatical, but wonderfully clear dialect, which reminds me, for all the world, of my own Standard American Seattle Disk-Jocky Spoken English Dialect; of which I do not know, and cannot say, whether I am more proudly grateful, or more gratefully proud.  It is a thing wonderful in my eyes, and ears, that, through no merit of my own, I have been bequeathed, in its purity, what is, for the time, virtually the universal language of mankind (Like Attic Greek in the 2nd century of the Common Era).  I speak the language that my mother and father spoke, correctly and effortlessly, as it was spoken by their mothers and fathers before them--aided and instructed by that purest of dialecticians, the Schoolmarm.