On respect, Mr Malema and other classy matters

I HAVE the deepest respect for Mr Peter Bruce, the editor of SA’s best daily, Business Day. And not only because he allows Eusebius McKaiser to write what he wants. Also because he is willing to say what’s on his mind.

One interesting surprise from this Monday’s column, for example, is Bruce’s suggestion that all people be shown respect in Business Day by having them referred to by their full titles. This is why I wash down breakfast on Mondays with The Thick End of the Wedge. Bruce has decided that from now on, even an artist formerly known as Juli-ass is to be referred to as Mr Malema, sir!

I think the idea is a fine one, actually. Respect, as many have claimed, goes a long way. Just ask joggers who pull middle fingers at presidential motorcades.

In essence, Bruce has my support on this one. It has, however, made me revisit some simmering thoughts about matters of class.

In one sense, Bruce is simply developing or resurrecting professional codes within the media. But it is also, I think, a class issue. There is something, isn’t there, about good old middle-class respect that requires titles to be, well, respected. Not just within the workplace but even domestically.

“Peter, go to your room at once, you naughty young man!”

“Yes, sir!”

My working-class dad would have frozen at that kind of upper middle-class linguistic marker of respect. Wish I had thought of calling him “Sir!” before I sneaked across class brackets.

I should, of course, acknowledge that respect itself is not class-specific, before I get lynched for implying that the poor unwashed masses lack it.

My gran, who was not unwashed, regularly told me: “Respect, my child, goes a looooong way!” But by that she did not mean I should call old Juli-ass Mr Malema. Although, she might have insisted that I call him Oom Juli-ass. His beer boep, after all, demands the respect of a big Oom, not unlike Oom Benni McCarthy’s.

In general, though, what my gran meant by respect was that I should not be blowing my nose at the lunch table and that I must never serve her church friends tea in cups that were not placed, so far as possible, on matching saucers. That was working-class respect, coloured with streaks of religiosity.

The more serious point I want to make is that class and income diverge sharply. In SA, we wrongly think of class and income as the same thing. This is why talk about the so- called black middle class, for example, drips with conceptual confusion.

Having a massive salary does not make you middle or upper class. It does not even, for that matter, indicate wealth.

Class is a function of many things, including language, accent, spending habits, tastes in food, clothing, education, what furniture you have or buy, drinks choices, what you read (if anything), table manners and so forth. Income is, at best, one marker.

But income is certainly not the sole or even the most important determinant of class.

Let’s take Juli-ass. Sorry, I meant to say Mr Malema. It does not matter how many tenders the man wins or how many Burberry bags he buys, he will remain working class.

No, I am not judging. I am just classifying. Upper-class toffs, for example, are not cute creatures. So it is not necessarily an insult to be working class.

And Malema is in good company. David Beckham, for example, will always be a chav — the English colloquialism for working-class folk of a particularly rough bent — regardless of what football bosses pay him.

Conversely, many journalists, academics and commentators are stuck in embarrassingly unimpressive living standards measure (LSM) brackets but could wear the tag “middle class” because they meet enough of the non-income aspects of the definition: education, language, accent, old furniture, book choices and so forth.

This is why even the term LSM is useless. It confuses income with living standard. I do not desire Malema’s “living standard” at all.

Does any of this matter?

In one sense, I guess not. Labels are just part of the language game that we play as sociolinguistic creatures.

In another sense, it does matter. We design social policies with measurable aims.

If we aim to increase the size of the middle class, we had better be clear whether we mean more folk with private bank accounts or more folk who prefer Business Day to dailies with smaller vocabularies, folk who resent wrestling shows on e.tv, folk who address people by their full titles.

Malema, funnily enough, knows all this. That is why he insists on remaining the son of a domestic worker.

Malema, unlike some of us, does not confuse class and income.

And he knows that class mobility, like elitism, is not for everyone