Charlotte Hays

You’ve met Charlotte Hays before: the spinster aunt at a wedding who thinks the bridesmaids’ outfits have too much décolletage and the bride probably “has to get married”; your grandmother — or great-grandmother — who thought that rock and roll was the devil’s own music and that Elvis Presley would bring Armageddon with his pelvis; the teacher who longs for the “good old days” when pregnant girls were kicked out of school, minority and special-needs children were in their show more own schools, you could paddle or expel children whenever you wanted, and students respected their elders — although certainly teachers didn’t respect their students; the outraged soccer mom who doesn’t want her daughter reading the Harry Potter books — so no one else should get to read them, either; Rex Roach, the Birmingham, Alabama, disc jockey who oversaw the grinding of Beatles records to dust; the Fox News-obsessed neighbor who thinks “those people” (fill in the blank) are dirty, disease-ridden, criminally inclined, and not to be trusted. In short, think about anyone who’s terrified of modernity or the Other, and you’ve got Charlotte Hays on her fainting couch.

Don’t go into this expecting a fond, funny look at the lower classes like My Name Is Earl or The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. You can tell from the title how judgmental this book is going to be; what you can’t tell is how mean-spirited and unfunny the patrician Hays is. Why can’t we bring back slut-shaming, brides completely ignorant of sex, and the lower classes knowing their place? Hays curls her dainty lip and sniffs at everything from piercings (including any earring, no matter how tiny or tasteful, on a man) to home mortgages to sex education to declining Sunday School attendance to tattoos to not knowing what fork to use at a fancy dinner. (I’m not making up the silverware bit.)

Hays holds up President Thomas Jefferson, quoting him approvingly: “It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.” It doesn’t matter that by “manners” Jefferson meant the mien of a people, not their knowledge of Emily Post. Nor, apparently, does taking sexual advantage of your slave matter if you have nice manners and an eloquent writing style. She holds up British historian Arnold Toynbee as the arbiter of good taste, quoting him repeatedly; apparently, dumping your wife for your secretary, as Toynbee did in 1946, also doesn’t matter if you know to turn your nose up at prole staples like Velveeta cheese, dress in Saville Row rather than Sean John, and opine, as Toynbee did in 1940, that the French apache scarf “was proof positive that the proletarian style was à la mode” (p. 11). Apparently, Hays’ beloved grandmother, who instilled Hays’ love of good manners and patrician taste, forgot to tell her that pretty is as pretty does.

At one point, Hays writes disapprovingly of hefty college-loan burdens and that 40 percent of Americans use credit cards to pay for basic living expenses, such as food and shelter. Because that’s appalling in the richest country in the world? Because we’re one of the few (perhaps only) industrialized countries that allow that sort of disparities of wealth? If you thought that, you don’t know Charlotte Hays! Because these jumped-up peasants in food deserts and overpriced housing markets are living beyond their means, of course! They should survive on beans, hotdogs, Vienna sausages, cream-of-mushroom soup casseroles, and Velveeta — so that Hays can make fun of their eating habits, too, as she does throughout the book (e.g., “And remember: Vienna sausages re pronounced VYE-eenna,” p. 53). And, while she’s at it, denigrate Americans because, on average, their debt load is 2.6 times higher than 30 years ago — just coincidentally the time when the good-mannered elite began shipping those good blue-collar jobs overseas and the federal government began swapping college grants for college loans. But don’t those captains of industry and their exquisitely coiffed wives know how to dress sharply and shine at state dinners?

What especially irked me was this: Why not blame the victims who lost their homes (pretending that all of them were social-climbers trying to buy McMansions) instead of financial institutions like Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase, and others? No, the worldwide 2009 economic collapse was due to “White Trash economics,” according to Hays; Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America agreed to fines of $5 billion, $13 billion, $14 billion, and $58 billion, respectively, for no reason at all! The total from the banksters comes to more than $200 billion, a pittance compared to how much they made off of arcane derivatives and other chicanery. (Be sure to read Matt Taibbi’s excellent The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap or Michael Lewis’s The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine to find out how they did it.) While Hays laments a lack of personal responsibility for White Trash, it’s no surprise that a member of the right-wing Independent Women’s Forum (which is neither independent nor a voice for women) doesn’t seem to think that JP Morgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, Bank of America’s Ken Lewis, Goldman Sach’s Lloyd Blankfein (who claimed he was “doing God’s work” in what many describe as defrauding investors), Citigroup’s Vikram Pandit, nor their underlings need assume any personal responsibility at all. After all, corporations exist specifically to avoid personal responsibility; the angry dispossessed sue the corporation, not the high-ranking humans who actually make the decisions.

I’ll give credit where credit is due: Hays’ book is a quick read, and many who don’t share her right-wing sensibilities are appalled by reality television, foul-mouthed celebrities, ubiquitous rudeness, and — dare I say it? — Velveeta (which can’t even call itself “cheese” on the label). But I’ll try to not be as harsh on Hays as she is on the proletariat; after all, Donald Trump as her party’s presidential nominee is punishment enough. show less

This was a decent little book. There were a few spots that had me laughing out loud (like the woman who didn't want to sit near a little boy in a tuxedo because she didn't want a homunculus sitting in her lap) and many, many more that had me smiling.

While this book highlighted the fact that North Carolina (the only place I've lived in The South) is much, much different from the Delta, it did explain a couple of things I considered odd at a couple of the weddings I'd attended there. And I'm show more notorious for leaving early when I'm a wedding guest, which, according to this book, makes me quite rude. I did, however, send out my thank-you cards within just a few months of my own wedding, so at least I got the most important wedding-related thing right.

I do regret having to return the book to the library before I had a chance to try some of the recipes on my family. show less

This was a very dishy, interesting, if uneven, book about a very unique and enterprising breed of women: fortune hunters. Those who make a career and a financial empire by marrying very wealthy men. Some of these women were revelations for me (Carol McDonald Portago Carey-Hughes Pistell Petrie). Some of them were reminders (Pamela Churchill Haywood Harriman). Some of them I would disagree should be categorized as Fortune Hunters (Princess Diana, Duchess of Windsor, Carolyn Bessette show more Kennedy...they may have married wealthy men, but they were not as calculated, almost militaristic as some of others like Petrie and Harriman. I would merely classify these three women who married the most eligible Princes in the world: the last two Prince of Wales and the Prince of America himself: JFK as "women who married well." None of these ladies had more than one husband, a distinct difference from the formidable ladies in this book.) This book is a very fun read. I love women who demonstrate strength, in whatever fashion. After all men have been doing that nobly for since the fall of the Goddess and this book certainly is a revelation. show less

Avery sad assessment of how far our society has fallen. A world lacking in manners, beliefs, and most importantly common sense. Oh and it is a rather funny book. you will notice it is not POOR WHITE TRASH. Income plays no part in the depths of trash behavior of a person.
Warning if you have children and they have a stupidly spelled name or the name of a stripper, if the care about the Kardashian's, if you think everything children do is precious and that their opinions are important, if you show more would never stop and think twice about taking your children to an expensive restaurant, on a14 hour plane ride, and bring them on your. Vacation to Tahiti or the. Maldives, if any of these descriptions describe you, YOU WILL NOT LIKE THIS BOOK NOR WILL YOU THINK IT IS FUNNY IN ANY WAY. show less