Category X… I enjoyed Paul Fussell's book Class with two exceptions:  the final chapter, which is a complete cop-out, and a rather strange lecture that Fussell gives about the prefix "in-":

A serious moment in cultural history occurred a few years ago, marking a significant takeover of public rhetoric by proles.  I'm referring to gasoline trucks changing the warning word on the rear from INFLAMMABLE to FLAMMABLE.  Widespread public education had at last produced a population which no longer recognized in- as an intensifier.  The proles for whom the sign FLAMMABLE was devised will be impelled when they hear that something (like a book or a work of art) is invaluable to toss it into the trash immediately.

Fussell's writing drifts in that pedantic direction and by its closing chapters has succeeded in tiring one of it.  Fussell seems to suggest above that "in-" is always an intensifier.  Really?  Inedible?  Inapt?  Insane?  Inaccurate?  While I do remember the sudden inflammable-to-flammable changeover (it's as if there is a secret committee that decides these things), surely the average person can be forgiven for getting tripped up by yet another of the English language's inconsistencies.  It is not odd to find the change pointless, but it is odd to be so upset about it.

The final chapter comes close to negating the book's appeal as light diversion.  In it Fussell postulates a sort of anti-class, called "category X", which purportedly exists completely outside the classes that Fussell has defined in the preceding 178 pages.  This category X is alarmingly like what we know as hippies:

Identifying X people is not difficult once you know the signs.  Their dress and looks, for one thing.  Since there's no one they think worth impressing by mere appearance, X people tend to dress for themselves alone, which means they dress comfortably, and generally "down".  One degree down will usually do the trick:  if black tie is designated, an X person appears in a dark suit (of a distinctly unstylish, archaic cut) and a notable necktie.  If suits are expected, he omits the tie.  If "informal" is the proclaimed style, his jeans will be torn and patched, his cords very used, if not soiled.  If others are wearing bathing suits, X people are likely to show up naked.

Please, Mr. Fussell.  You are disturbing us with images of poorly groomed, fat, naked hippies (he claims category X is never fat, but this seems to be a lie).  He goes on for awhile about how ostentatiously they dress (as if to crassly bring attention to themselves), finally moving on to more nauseating facts about this super-class:

Favorite X sport:  ad hoc games of touch football, especially while slightly drunk.  X people tend to eschew the obvious kinds of pets, leaning instead toward things like tame coyotes, skunks, peacocks, and anteaters.  X people are likely to appear with unexplained sexual partners, and some have been known to become pregnant at socially inappropriate moments.  Their infant issue they may tote about in ways that appear novel, if not shocking, to the middle class:  in slings, for example, or backpack papoose carriers.

Possibly while "slightly drunk".  Fussell is a professor and through the entire chapter he shows off his occupation's aesthetic and social preferences, as well as its near-worship of boisterous and undisciplined young students.  (Couples who experience pregnancy at inappropriate moments are not rising above class, they are simply too clueless to manage birth control properly.  If they are "category X" they will of course completely scar their children with unproven childraising theories.)

Fussell does not detect that what he is describing is not a separate category but rather a phase that certain young people pass through on their way to adulthood (and which their more pathetic mentors actually mimic, embarrasingly, in an effort to fit in).  The young student loves to be informal because he feels uncomfortable with his limited knowledge of social customs and because he still clings to an impromptu adolescent chumminess.  He behaves strangely and defies conventions mainly because he is insecure – his great dreams and great ambitions and general aura of impending great greatness are not quite matched by circumstances (and never will be); he still has to work at places like Virgin Megastore and Starbucks.  Hence, the need to flout rules to show that they must be wrong about him.  (His influence is seen especially in the workplace, where business casual is the leading indicator of a sloppy, immature, indulgent business culture, which reached its lowest point in the 90s at dot-coms staffed by people who spent most of the day running up and down the halls playing tag.)

As Fussell describes him, the category X person is a fool with a huge ego.  He owns pets which aren't domesticated (and therefore can't really enjoy human companionship or confinement indoors), he refuses to sit on furniture, he does nothing systematically because he prefers to be unreliable, and he loves camp and kitsch.  The most telling thing about him is that his choices in decor and everything else are intended to tell people how clever he is.  Indeed this is a bit of an obsessive quality about Fussell's category X:  he needs you to know that he is there, and still a jackass.

Convention, as Stillman noted in Metropolitan, is usually there for a reason that the thoughtful can discern.  But not category X.  They refuse to wear ties!  This is a very bold statement of something.  What it seems to say is that category X people are obsessed with the way the world sees them, and pay more attention to their outward appearance than the regular classes do – perhaps more attention than is merited by their significance.

Similarly, in intellectual matters category X simply must leave Plato's Republic lying out (college students always think this impresses people), they simply must whistle Moussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition (they love pretentious musical samplers), and of course they will find a way to let you know that the only people they idolize are ironic pop culture figures, and themselves.  Their display is meant to say, "Of course I have read and listened to this stuff, perhaps on an imaginary tour of the continent, but in my world this is all, you know, so ordinary."  Fussell also alludes to category X's doctrinaire Leftism (he actually gives Mother Jones as an example of what they read), which is again in keeping with campus social life.

Fussell goes on and on about this terribly unappealing group of people, completely oblivious as to whom he is really talking about, and in places merely transcribing his personal preferences and tics and those of the students who strangely impress him.  It is an important rule with a book such as this that the author never let his feigned authority slip completely away.  Fussell breaks the rule in spectacularly bungling fashion and confesses to his own class anxiety.  This rather spoils the book.