Poshness; Lucius Malfoy

[Rita Winston]

No: HPFGUIDX 5911

--- In HPforGrownups at egroups.com, "Jim Flanagan" <jamesf at a...> wrote:

> Perhaps as a result of our civil rights movement, it's somewhat 
> unfashionable over here to make public comments that are 
> class-aware.

The USA had a public mythology ideology that we are a classless 
society (or at least an entirely middle-class society) before there 
was a civil rights movement. 

> For example, making Justin, the kid who was "down for Eton," a
> Hufflepuff. Was this a classist put-down, like M. Python's "Upper 
> -class Twit of the Year" sketch?  

We think alike: last week I posted that Justin Finch-Fletchly, the 
junior version of Monty Python's upper class twit, 's only function 
in the plot is to demonstrate that Muggle social class means nothing 
to wizards: at Hogwarts, he and Colin Creevey the milkman's son are 
equals.

But the wizarding folk have their own apparently rigid social class 
hierarchy, and making the only landed gentry in the book (the 
Malfoys) the biggest villains among living humans struck me as a 
nice example of 'vulgar Marxism'. If we really believe in not 
sterotyping or being prejudiced, we must allow for the possibility of 
some good guys among the gentry. Maybe even some good guys who look 
like stupid apes.

> Lucius Malfoy is a puzzle to me:  If he is so class-conscious why 
> would he associate himself with lunkheads like Crabbe and Goyle, 
> and with McNair,

Crabbe and Goyle, at least, are his henchmen rather than his friends. 
They are doubtless hereditary men-at-arms or vassals of the Malfoy 
family. Maybe MacNair is also a hereditary follower of  Malfoys, or 
maybe he and Lucius were just assigned to work together by V, and 
Lucius gritted his teeth and obeyed.

> Why also would Malfoy participate in adolescent behavior like
> tossing the muggle family around at the World Cup? 

He thought it was fun? 

At this time, Westerners think that thinking it is fun to torture 
people is mentally ill, but were our predecessors still attending 
public hangings as a fun entertainment by one hundred years ago = 
1900? If not, they must only recently have given it up. And bear- 
baiting, and Roman gladiatorial shows ....