Comedy and Pain

Eric Blore, with a Side of Franklin Pangborn

Eric Blore was born in Middlesex in 1887, and he began his professional life as an insurance agent, which makes perfect physiognomic sense—he looks like an insurance agent. He also looks very much like the roles that came to dominate his ninety or so film credits: butlers and valets, headwaiters and hotel managers, men who serve in some capacity. I suppose I’m saying that butlers look like insurance agents, which I’ve never quite considered, but now that I do consider, it has the ring of absolute truth, or, at the very least, mild plausibility or, as Robert Benchley might have said, but perhaps would have restrained from saying, errant possibility.

Eric Blore is certainly the name of a character actor, the producers-that-be never bothering to change it, never needing to, which is true, as well, for the names of many other character actors (for instance, Franklin Pangborn) by the same reasoning that they did change the names of their leading actors: character actors could have names with character, suggesting quirks or strangeness, even, at times, ethnic connections, whereas leading actors, the Issur Danielovitch Demskys (Kirk Douglas), William Beedle Jrs. (William Holden), Natalia Zakharenkos (Natalie Wood), and Doris Kapelhoffs (Doris Day) had to be smoothed out, WASPed, for a general audience.

Eric Blore, clearly enough, is just a letter, an inflection away from “bore,” and the consonantly traffic jam of c and b suggests trouble. Franklin Pangborn is an entirely different matter. Pangborn sounds like either some kind of comically emotional ricochet, as in, “I barely had time to register my sorrow before I was pangborned into laughing at my own absurdity,” or an Old English anachronism for a difficult birth: “âgnod hêahmægenûteweard wanspêdig cwên tôhwon bêgra pangborn.” But in both men we have names suited for a character actor, and a specifically comedic one at that: yet another example of my long-held belief in nominal determinism.

The two actors shared this: born two years apart (Pangborn in 1889, Blore two years earlier), they both served in the First World War. Blore was with the South Wales Borderers, and though not much more is known about his service, the probability that he saw combat is likely. Pangborn, on the American side, was in the infantry and was gassed and wounded at the Battle of Argonne. Both men frequently played characters easily frustrated, with short fuses.

Why Eric Blore specifically interests me (though Franklin Pangborn, too—as often as I get a chance to pronounce his name I will, simply for the delight, the balanced syllables and the imbalanced sense—the stolid Franklin, and the silly Pangborn, the setup and the punchline, the step and the banana peel: Pangborn is a nominal banana peel) is what I want to think about, because I think Blore connects both to something in me and in comedy that I want to understand. Clearly, at some point, either Fred Astaire, who had worked with him on the Gay Divorce on Broadway or Mark Sandrich, who directed many of the Astaire-Rogers films, noticed his particular talents and started casting him over and over in the Astaire-Rogers films, more appearances as a character actor than any other—more even than Edward Everett Horton, his best foil. And this both springboarded and typecast Blore—although not completely—as the supercilious but frustrated butler or valet or waiter, the under-class role of the hyper-solicitous subordinate with a cultivated servant’s English accent, clearly more refined than his American employers (though his own class provenance was frequently dubious in the films).

What is so funny about Blore, but also so interesting? For me, it’s the quickness of his veering from delight to pain. He is delighted when, as a corrective, describing exactly how things should be done, or offering a finicky, minute bit of protocol. He seems to love talking about these things the way an antiquarian does with arcana. He has a bit of knowledge that no one is interested in and he wraps the extravagance of his belabored accent around his knowledge like a tongue with its favorite succulence, speaking as though his audience were slow, etiquette-challenged. They are, of course, you see: Americans. But no one much cares about what he cares about, or his service, except to take it for granted. His scenes with Horton are many of his best, are riots of class inversion, and almost invariably the funniest in the films of Astaire and Rogers that they’re in together.

Blore’s pain is almost invariably based on miscommunication, on misunderstandings of pronunciation, on the exactitude of diction (his) that others mangle or mishear, and his insistence on forms of behavior that fit the decorum of situations that his masters, the men he serves specifically or generally (“butling” them or serving them in restaurants, hotels) seem intent on violating. Which is to say, Blore always seems to come from a place where knowledge is settled—an historically accepted decorum—even though relational hierarchies are wavering, empires are crumbling, it’s the middle of the Depression, and this is the United States, not England.

Blore’s most famous line, repeated in two films (first in The Sky’s the Limit [1943], another Fred Astaire film, sans Ginger), was: “If I weren’t a gentleman’s gentleman, I could be such a cad’s cad.” Blore’s performances all smack of farce, of the drawing room, with the attendant suggestion of mistaken identity, with a wash of modern absurdity and class consciousness thrown in. Is he a cad’s cad? In Top Hat (1935), the most successful of Astaire and Rogers’s films (and RKO’s most profitable film of the 1930s), Blore is the valet to Edward Everett Horton, though we hear right off the bat that the two are in a struggle—an unconventional relationship, certainly—when Horton (as Horace Hardwick) tells Fred Astaire (Jerry Travers), “My man Bates . . . we’ve had a bit of a tiff.” He goes on to explain that “Bates is never right,” a curious assertion toward the man charged with dressing him and generally arranging his household affairs. Their disagreement, which has all the hallmarks of a domestic spat, a couple’s quarrel, is over Horton’s ties, the use and selection of which Blore disapproves. Upon meeting Astaire, Blore says, “Allow us to introduce ourselves, sir. We are Bates.” The hilarious pomposity of the royal “we,” its grandiosity, further reinforces the sense that in the coupling of Horton-Blore, Blore sees himself as the superior partner. His English royal “we” trumps the sickly, sloppy American “I.” Bates is slumming by serving a “master,” whose haberdashery is clearly so unrefined, so chaotic.

But there’s more: we learn in an important aside between Astaire and Horton what Bates-Blore’s provenance is. He’s been hired from the Salvation Army. So he is a butler hired out of hard times—can you say My Man Godfrey, filmed the following year. (This is the Depression, after all, and part of the success of Astaire and Rogers is the glamour of their films and the escapism associated with Astaire’s tuxedo and top hat; although too infrequently does it get marked that the Depression either appears around the edges of the films themselves, or that Astaire in many of the films is marked as humble in origins, a hoofer, a vaudevillian, who then scores some kind of big success.) Six years later, Eric Blore (and Franklin Pangborn!) features as the valet in Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels, which has an opposite class trajectory: the wealthy director moving downward to try and experience (absurdly) the life of the lower class. But to the point: Blore’s hyperconscious language, his super-sibilant butler’s compensatory hyperarticulation, which would never work in an English setting (he would be seen as social climbing and absurd, and dismissed for being florid, rather than . . . serviceable) suggests that he has, at some point, had a reasonable position and, well, slipped, fell through the economic cracks. The Englishness of his gentleman’s gentlemanliness, his recent status as discarded, the bickering relationship with his master all conspire to create class confusion, instability, a petri dish of chaotic elements from which comic situations can grow.

At the end of Top Hat, Blore-Bates, having served his “masters” through a series of madcap misadventures that push the Astaire-Rogers film close to musical screwball comedy at times, finds himself soaking wet as a debunked gondolier and facing a poker-faced carabiniere who finds his imposture actionable, and what’s more, unamusing. Bates, for all his loyalty, his service, is going to be arrested. Faced with this implacable countenance and the opportunity for a free pass to express his resentment of authority, he says, “You don’t understand English? I’ve been waiting for an opportunity like this since my childhood, you frozen faced flatfoot.” The carabiniere, obligingly, replies, “Grazie, signore.” Bates-Blore, assured that he can continue to express his resentment, proceeds with relish: “Grazie to you, you stultified shrimp. Can I help it if you look like a mildewed donkey? Oh, I’m adoring this.” On cue, the carabiniere: “Grazie, signore.” Continuing: “And grazie to you, since you insist; you see I happen to be breaking the law; I admit it wholeheartedly, but of course you would never know that, you fish-faced nincompoop.”

“Grazie, signore.”

Laughing, Bates says goodnight and turns to leave, at which point the carabiniere, in perfectly accented, though uninflected English, reads him an arrest warrant. Blore’s face squeezes in comic consternation while an eyebrow rises at the risibility of the subterfuge and the strange absurdity of the scene we and he have witnessed.

Blore was a master at prefulmination, something headed way past exasperation and frustration. His face became a kind of volcanic surface when he was annoyed, eyes darkly narrowed, and his lips would bubble like hot lava. You knew he would soon say, “Sir,” or, “Excuse me,” in the tone of a servant wanting to make an arrest but knowing, of course, that despite having the high ground (the sense of knowledge, of protocol—the right tie to wear, who should be in whose room), despite being on the edge of high dudgeon, he lacked the “law” behind him: he was merely right; he was trying to enforce the class rules he inherited onto the class he served, who sometimes just didn’t care about the rules, thus, Edward Everett Horton wearing the wrong tie. One of the things that interests me most about Blore is how often in his central performances—and here I mean Top Hat, Shall We Dance, The Lady Eve—Blore either runs afoul of the law or is on the wrong side of it. His serving the interests of the upper class don’t seem to serve him particularly well in Top Hat and Shall We Dance, and in Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve, which I’ll talk more about later, he’s an out-and-out swindler, a delighted parasite on the wealth of suburban Connecticut, trading on the American upper class love of aristocracy, especially English. If his accent allows him to bully Americans with a confusion about his class origins, despite his status as servant, in The Lady Eve it is Americans’ self-duplicity in the desire to undemocratically throw themselves at Sir Alfred McGlennan Keith, a clearly Scottish name that doesn’t in any way jibe with Blore’s accent or presentation that serves as parody of the pretensions of class.

But I want to talk about Top Hat and Shall We Dance a bit more, where Blore’s performances seem so, well, painful, at times. So pained really. Of course it’s comic, comedic pain, and this is part of the great source of its power. The standard line about comedians is about how often their work is rooted in anger, and that the source of anger is some kind of enabling wound. But comic character actors are different from comedians—their essences are performative and expressive as opposed to the writerly source of comedians. Comedians may be fine performers, too, of course, and their sense of performative timing is crucial to the delivery of their material—most of us have had the experience of seeing/hearing material that was really good, but not particularly well delivered. The water used to be more muddied in the division between comedian and comic character actor than it is now, when comedians, in vaudeville, on radio, and early TV, had bits of their own but frequently relied on shifting teams of writers and existed less on the strength of wildly original material, as most of today’s comedians do, than on the uniqueness of persona and acuteness of comic timing. Think Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Buddy Hackett, all of whom were extraordinary character actors in film.

The now familiar bromide that comedy is tragedy plus time, repeated pedantically by Alan Alda in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors as though this were his original thought, has been attributed to various people, from Lenny Bruce to Carol Burnett to Steve Allen, but it seems Mark Twain was really the first to say it, or some version of it. He also wrote, in Following the Equator, that “the secret source of humor itself is not joy, but sorrow.” I’d widen that: I’d say comedy is also about complication, error, misrecognition, dissatisfaction—yes, and sometimes a wellspring of hot underground misery or tragedy that needs to lose its heat as it approaches the surface and cools into humor. Comedy helps us face taboo, the unspeakable, the repressed, the heartbreakingly irresolvable, through transmutation into supposedly safer territory. But comedy is frequently therefore a veneer allowing the articulation of “dangerous” ideas, feelings, situations: think of the comedy of mistaken identification from Greek theater with its masks, to Shakespeare’s comedies, and so on: Restoration comedy, the parlor comedies of (un)revealed affiliation and the way they more than flirt with incest, the graveyard jokes covering the existential skulls and bones of the gravedigger, children’s delight in ghastly jokes of blood and mayhem (some of these hang around for generations), what we call “black humor,” merely a stroke away from much of the rest of jokes we tell, in fact, but consigned to a special category we lower our voices for because we need to qualify our delight in the grotesque, the misshapen punchline that renders a deeply satisfying groan from our listener, as though we had violated their deepest sense of decorum, but they could only hope for more. The essence of comedy is repackaging the painful; however one might style “pain.”

But Blore. You might wonder why I’m writing about a man who played fussy butlers, stuttering valets. Why him? Maybe the key to all of his performances is actually in Fancy Pants (1950), with Bob Hope and Lucille Ball. Fancy Pants is one of Blore’s last significant roles. He’s only fifty-three, but seems older, and is playing a dual role that is both extraordinarily funny and rather haunting. True to many of his performances, all of Fancy Pants is about class, inversions of roles, masquerade. Bob Hope plays an actor who onstage, in England, is playing an American butler impersonating (badly) an English butler. Blore plays, variously, (he is acting in both his onstage and offstage roles in the film) a member of the same company as Hope and then an aristocratic gentleman who Hope’s faux gentleman’s gentleman is masquerading as to curry favor with the rough mannered but financially endowed American, Lucille Ball. Got that straight? It’s like a funhouse, B-movie comedy Henry James. Without—you know—all the pratfalls.

But what’s so uncannily funny about Blore, whose trademark was always his slippery butler’s accent and his linguistic duel with American slang, is that he’s completely unintelligible throughout the film. Not to put too Monty Pythonish a spin on it, but he really does sound like a stroke victim who doesn’t know he’s afflicted—an upper-class English accent rendered as a man speaking with a mouth full of marbles, unaware that his words, or perhaps any words, should have shape. Despite the film’s mediocrity, it’s a stroke of genius because of the way Blore’s incomprehensible speech (which Bob Hope translates, we guess as saying whatever he wants him to say) comments on how any British accent heard by class-climbing Americans, even one rendered as garbled and guttural nonsense, will be beaten into some kind of sense, respected as meaningful by the upwardly mobile. It’s an Edward Learian premise with an Orwellian edge. Bob Hope’s poker-faced interpretations of the unintelligible garble, with barely a wink to the fourth wall, to those of us wondering what strange language, really, Eric Blore is talking now that he isn’t serving badinage to Edward Everett Horton, are the meat grinder through which the colony puts the language of the “mother country.”

This anarchistic, postcolonial flirtation is actually dangerous territory for a mild comedy on the cusp of the 1950s with no obviously larger satirical end in mind. (Bob’s Hope brilliance was in the moment, the aside, the prefiguring of the anxious unmasculine man who managed to make stolid patriarchal figures look ridiculous—that’s one of the reasons he and Jack Benny and Red Skelton were so influential on the generation of comedians who followed them. But then again, haven’t male comic figures—the jester—always been something of a thorn in the side of the patriarchy? I always found it amusing when a comic’s anarchy turned into an older comedian swinging a golf club and speaking at the Republican convention. Shout out to Groucho for never having fallen victim to that.)

So, in Fancy Pants, Eric Blore, the paterfamilias Sir Wembley (who, again, is not Sir Wembley but an actor playing him, and is equally incomprehensible in any role he plays), shows us how in his roles the figure of English decorum has progressed: from a post–World War I figure of ridiculous and dubious gentility (the gentleman’s gentleman) to a post–World War II figure of raving incoherence—that’s the way the world goes, from mild nonsense to insane blather. What makes it constantly funny (uneasily, again, since it has the whiff of disability, or madness) is that no one really seems to notice. Imagine hearing the most twee British accent: “Oh dear old Daddy. No one has ever really been able to figure out anything he’s saying.” (My interpolation.)

A film that once again demolishes assumptions about class but uses Eric Blore as a wrecking ball, rather than a chess piece, is Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve (1941), one of the great American comedies and an essential screwball. Blore plays one of the many grifters in the film (including Eve [Barbara Stanwyck]) who have their eyes out for moneyed pigeons to pluck. Curly, Blore’s “real name” in the film (he has almost no hair), seems either ironic (Three Stooges) or a nod to a knowledge of earlier physiognomy and is used sparingly by his grifter friends. He has taken on the absurdly titled pseudonym of Sir Alfred McGlennan Keith—absurd because the Scottish name ill suits his utter Englishness, but if you’re going to pull a con, why not just go over the top, pay no attention to logic. As Curly says to his con men and women friends of his marks among the moneyed American class, “When one’s name is Sir Alfred McGlennan Keith, RFD [an invented acronym—Royal Fire Department? Royal Forensic Duelists?] one doesn’t have to meet them, one fights them off with sticks. And there’s no hurry, we have them through the year, like a lease.” Blore-Curly’s casual disdain for the American upper class of Connecticut, and their swooning for his aristocratic pedigree, is as pleased and unfraught as any overmatched meeting between hunter and prey. It’s delightfully cynical. Asked if he knows the wealthy beer baron Pikes, the family of Henry Fonda, whom Barbara Stanwyck has courted and been thrown over by, Blore says, “Do I know them? I positively swill in their ale.” With Preston Sturges, Blore trades his fluster for bluster, of a rather cool kind. But he’s still all about the confusions of class, the mistaking of an accent and look for the supposedly genuine article. But of course anyone and anything interested in satirizing the noblesse oblige and those who would enshrine it, understands that the emptiness of privilege is to demonstrate how its manners are mannerisms and that its decorum is merely decorous. As Orson Welles so brilliantly reminds us in F for Fake, copies can not only pass for the original but actually be more interesting. Blore, whether talking up to his “masters” as butler, and befuddling them, or talking down to the admirers of his faux aristocratic bona fides, is a sibilant sibyl of the American ideology of anti-aristocracy—his role is to show how artificial the rules of politesse are, and how manners are merely constructs. We are meant to understand that he’s here because he doesn’t want to, or simply can’t, be there. Thus, slumming, and suggesting the entire idea of class is rather surreal. Eric Blore (Eric Blair?) in his own way is a comic force for democratic populism.

If it isn’t already clear, what I love about Eric Blore’s characters are their pained attempts to serve and maintain dignity, to convey what they believe are the proper forms, to use language in ways that are specific, pleasing, but that create ideological friction. He veers from frustration into moments of delight, which I must confess my complete identification with. When he breaks through to seeming communication, acknowledging the point with a “Yes” (whose final consonant can last weeks), there is a palpable relief, a lift of anxiety that I feel with him, as though a simple resolution were the impossible chalice that anyone could spend a lifetime trying to track. For someone as conflict averse as I consider myself, during these moments of relief, the bliss lighting up his face almost bizarrely beatific, I simply experience Blore as an icon of misunderstanding (or: a martyr?) and its attendant near miss: misery.

Take this interchange with Edward Everett Horton in Gay Divorcee (1934), the second Astaire-Rogers film, in which Blore recreates the role of the Waiter, which he first played on stage with Astaire. Serving Everett Horton, he asks, “Would you be the kind of man who would ring for a toasted scone?” Everett Horton, in his continuing role of befuddled and neurotic Yankee, for whom language is full of trap doors, is perpetually annoyed by Blore’s characters in all their mutual screen appearances. He replies, “No, no, try me again.”

Blore: “Can you imagine yourself with a hankering for a nice gooseberry tart?” (His questions, are you the kind of man, can you imagine yourself, asking so much more of Everett Horton as patron in a restaurant than he is prepared for.)

Everett Horton: “No, no what an acid thought.”

Blore: “No crumpets, no gooseberry tart?” He seems perturbed.

Blore: “Well, that lands both of us in the cul-de-sac. You know, I hate to leave both of us like this. You torn with doubt and me with my duty undischarged. . . . Now sir, was it a bit of half-and-half? A noggin of ale, a pipkin of porter, a stoop of stout, or a breaker of beer?” Here, Blore gleams, he is shining with self-delight. And despite Everett Horton’s attempts to regain his equilibrium, perhaps his mastery, by asserting his desire, simply, for tea, as a deflating riposte, Blore’s delight will not be undone. “Tea?” he says. “Well, isn’t it a small world, sir!” In short, tea is English, and no matter who is master, in the world of tea, Blore, though he serves, is no spiritual underling. This moment is full of the sparks of empire, or perhaps it’s the embers. Which is no doubt why all Everett Horton can do is respond with one of his masterful double takes.

Perhaps you thought I’d forgotten about Franklin Pangborn? It’s been pages and pages since I’ve crossed my eyes with delight at his nominal tensions (can a Franklin be a Pangborn? Should he? Where have all the Pangborns gone? Etc.), his oxymoronic name. But I haven’t forgotten. Pangborn appeared with Blore in Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels, and occupies a special place in the heart of devotees of character actors. Pangborn, with Blore, played men who serve (remember, ironically they both “served” in the worst of circumstances, in World War I—did that give their performances as underlings a twist, an unstated frisson of exasperation?) though Pangborn’s specialty was managers of various kinds: bank assistant managers, hotel managers, nightclub managers. But frequently he was second in charge, at best. And the role of “assistant” manager is important to note since it adds an extra layer of vexation to his scenes, those moments when one is thwarted but lacks a complete control of one’s environment.

I always associated with those frustrated representatives of authority, those butlers and assistant managers, Blore and Pangborn, not because I associated with authority but with resistance to it, because their roles themselves represent men who have become caught in a process or organization, acting out of duty in a way that inevitably leads to frustration.

When a good-looking hero flaunts the rules with a bit of delightful, minor anarchy (brings a woman into his chambers for the night, takes what he needs for the moment without paying for it, simply acts based on what he wants in situ—leading-men roles in many Hollywood golden era comedies are really big babies with uncontrollable ids) I was and still am torn in my reaction. I enjoy the anarchy, the rules broken—how could I not, having gone to late-night school with the Marx Brothers for so long—but another part of me, and I think perhaps many viewers, also feels the pathos in the comedy of the clerk, the butler, the assistant manager who is befuddled, irritated, confused, overruled in his (or her, of course, though policing characters tend more often to be male) attempt to play by or enforce the rules, because they have to, because they’ve learned that that’s their role, that’s how they get by. Chaos is the fantasy of our childhoods, and the liberated occasional moments of our adult lives, so it makes sense that leading men and women, within the bounds of the Code, can take liberties with behavioral delinquencies (as long as they don’t really challenge the social order). But leading actors in their roles almost always end up supporting conventional patterns of behavior, despite their flouting moments.

It is the strange intensity of the comically straightlaced service figure, like Blore and Pangborn, that ends up, ironically, seeming more challenging, even borderline transgressive. Think of Blore’s “stroke” dialogues, the class inversions in his roles.

With Pangborn, early on, the ease with which he was provoked into a kind of male hysteria raises all kinds of subtle questions about gender, sexuality, control. Gradually, the comic element in his career became explicitly about when he would be provoked into an almost surreal, manic crisis. Man crisis.

Pangborn’s face is bulldog rectitude with a pencil moustache. Before he is thwarted he usually smiles with a winning and disingenuous sense of barely contained servitude. Maybe that’s why Pangborn was always so funny—the secret of his officiousness was his simultaneous commitment to it and undermining of it, and the sense, in his face, that the function of the functionary was beyond dutiful, was almost hieratic, and personally painful. When, inevitably, the ordinary run of things was disturbed, when for example, he was charged in Preston Sturges’s Hail the Conquering Hero with arranging the heroic interludes of music hailing faux hero Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith (Eddie Bracken), only to have his student bands inevitably start playing at the wrong moment. (“Not yet, not yet!” he keeps imploring, as though the war, II, were being lost because of a few stray notes, loose trumpet lips sinking ships.) Pangborn becomes desperate. His slicked-down hair starts to commit civil disobedience; his narrow eyes widen and dart with panic.

And his voice: Pangborn, though born in New Jersey, was one of many first generation talkie actors who possessed or nurtured a high culture New England or Mid-Atlantic accent (Edward Everett Horton had this, too), which was like an English accent that had been through a cycle of the wash, probably cold. I’m not sure that this accent exists in the United States anymore, but you hear it everywhere in films of the ’30s and, to some extent, the ’40s (I think the war might have dried it out). It was a remnant of a time when accent and class were more linked than they are now in the United States. The easiest way to signify education, or power, or the upper class, was to have a character speak as though they had been through Harvard but docked at Southampton.

When Pangborn loses his wits because things aren’t going his way, his voice rises, and he starts to act like a windup toy bumping into walls, turning this way and that, not knowing what to do with his body now that the rules are being broken, now that the world isn’t working exactly the way he was told it should. He’s a funny little priest who can’t remember who his god is. In other words, he breaks down. And it’s painfully funny. No one has ever been better than Pangborn (can we create a Nominal Hall of Fame and start it off with “Pangborn,” “because once said, it must be repeated”?) at showing us that bureaucracy’s front man is not only vulnerable but close to hysterical.

Blore and Pangborn were two of the best of the many footmen and servitors, majordomos and stewards, middlemen and supervisors who show up in Hollywood film. In comedies that try to find a footing to represent or, even in the rare case of a more radical director like Preston Sturges, undermine the complexities of American capitalist hierarchies—bosses and workmen, guests and waiters and waitresses, butlers and their “masters”—both actors always seem to be placed in situations that either cannot sensibly work for who they are or cannot work at all if you want to follow the rules. Their accented frenzies and implosions are, for me, always beautifully timed reminders of American social systems, stratifications not really so far gone from us, when this thing called “order” was just waiting to implode, before it started to explode.