GREAT LEVELLERS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21882, 18 August 1934, Page 1 (Supplement)

GREAT LEVELLERS

BY HILDA KEANE

CARS, CINEMAS, CABARETS

One of our great headmasters remarked, a few years before his death, that the motor-ear had more to do with class distinction than anything yet invented by man. I wondered at the time if he were right. Those were tlio years when the pseudo-rich dashed through the puddles, scattering mud over the unwary pedestrian; the days when one said, " I would like a car, but only if I had a man to drive it!" E\'eing the ungainly contraptions, one compared them with the graceful lines of the horse-drawn carriage and their collapses with the solid utility of the family buggy, and again withheld a concluding judgment. But who could possibly say to-day, of motor-cars and motor-drivers, that they represent a class severed and uplifted from any other ?

How much had the first cheap American car to do with the levelling process? For long, there may -have been a distinction between him who drove a " flivver " and sat upright in his not over-padlled seat and tho luxurious loller who rested his elbow on the sill and bounced upon his well-sprung cushions. But " swank " was doomed when the " new models " became an annual temptation; and the secondhand market opened its treasures, a little road-soiled but superficially luxurious as ever, to the owner of tho flivver." This, again, perhaps the envy of a poorer family, became available on tho same time-payment system which enabled tho seeming plutocrat to gloat over his gadgets for this and that and tho upholstery of his limousine.

Limousine! Ah, that did spell wealth! But not for long. The very name has gone; and even the " babies," without pride or boast, carry all that once stood for luxury supreme. Saloons and sedans, tourers and sports, midgets—• all, to-day, are just cars —and anybody, bankrupt or out-of-work, honest or otherwise, may own any one of them and hold up his head with the best once ho puts foot to the accelerator. As long as there is enough in the purse to fill the petrol tank the battered relic of pre-war days may puff along the concrete and heed not the most musical klaxon of silent, chauffeurguided road-ships.

Shared Seats and Floors And does anyone recall the vanity which made a " good seat" at the theatre so desirable? " don't want to go unless I can have a cab and sit in the best seats." That's what used to be said in all good families. People might talk of cheap concerts on the Continent; our ideals were different. We liked to be seen; and to be seen in the wrong seats was gall and wormwood. And sitting in expensive rows meant that buses and trams were unthinkable as ccjmveyances. " Send for a four-wheeler, and look as if you were driving in your own carriage. Tell the man to call at eleven."

We have changed all that. When one sits in the dark, a sixpenny seat is as good as a shilling one, if there's only sixpence in the pocket. Who is sitting next me? A chimney-sweep? No, he does not exist any longer, except in an occasional advertisement. Our greengrocer? Your dressmaker? Who knows? Who cares? We have lost our old, false social standards. _ We are just ,picture-goers. There is 110 '• pit " where only boys may go unashamedly to sit on forms with the men from back streets. They no longer eat oranges—the last word in vulgarity —or hail their bedizened sisters, playing " rich " in the front seats. The hundreds pay their shillings; their suits and their frocks are so similar that it is difficult to find a straying relative; the " perms " and the eyebrows and the scarlet lips aro as good in the front stalls as in the backs. And the tram waits till the pictures are out. So with the modern dance-hall. It began with the jazz, which revolved or stalked about the little dinner tables; and, tho world over, it has stayed at the cabaret stage so long that tho change from the exclusive private dance to the one shared by a dozen different parties may bo regarded as fixed. When we had distinctions wo danced, our select private group, at a house or in a hall hired for the occasion, or we preened in public at a fashionable ball. For centuries this held. To go to one of the public dancehalls of the proletariat was unthinkablo; it was never even suggested. But now our invitations read: "Your company is requested at 1000 Review Street and afterward at Golden Shoes Cabaret." We begin at the home and transfer ourselves, by means of carsmotor, one presumes—to the public dance-hall. There our party disports itself, mixed up on the floor, among dancers from anybody else's party,- and is conscious of behaving in the most modish manner possible. Tho social barriers have gone down with a vengeance; there aro none any longer.

Social Revolution So what with cars turned out by the million, all more or less alike, with pictures for the million, and cabarets catering for the million, there being no difference in the way it is all done, in Hong Kong or Berlin or anywhere else, the great levelling process is going on. Pleasure has becoms standardised; appearance is standardised. And when the poor spends his leisure as the rich spends his, rushing round in a car or dancing round in a hall, there cannot be any distinction. ono can scarcely qualify by saying '• a question of degree," for where is the degree? Wo can find other levelling causes such as unemployment- —one hears of the barrister working side by side with tlio barber —but these, ono feels, arc not permanent relationships. Some circumstance may push one of those men into a job to-morrow. But nothing prevents him from sharing the same pictures, tlio samo dance-hall. The greatest social revolution of the ages is working out in our sight. Yet there are still people whose folly it is to preach what they call Communism. It is here. Not the illusory grab-froni-the-other-fellow and live in some strange Paradise ol : lessened action, but that common level of living, whether it is in flats or in houses built small for convenient freedom, and that common level of amusement which takes us out in our motor-car, old or new, shining or a little battered, sends us camping along the summer roads, and that free sitting side by side in the picture theatre, and the common possession, for so many hours, of the cabaret dancing iloor. Surely this is communism.

And even our humanitarianism is a form of the same thing. Who really cared, a few decades ago, that .some fellow citizen had not enough to eat? But everybody feels responsible these days and ashamed of poverty for others. Taxpayers growl, but as long as their money goes to keep another man's family fed they do not mind. There is probably more of the " fellow-feeling " that " makes us wondrous kind " than there ever was, because we have this universal desire to put an end to unhappiness for the individual whom once wo would have styled " poor."