Letters to the Editor
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"Working Class" used to be something people wanted to lift themselves out of
I guess not so much anymore. Well, tell me how that works out for you.
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Missed that story of Honest Obama turning down crap food!
He sure looked classy and polite turning down that pestersome low class fat baller. Did that happen at the bowling alley? Glad to see that one sincerely genuine candidate isn't afraid to show his true self in this race.
The insufferable mendacity of Sen Clinton having a beer and a shot was teh funny though. I mean A BEER and a FREAKIN SHOT. Who ever heard such a thing? Or, like, meeting people in a local tavern. The lengths some people will go to appear human.
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@ Electro Robot
One can aspire to -- and work hard to get into -- a better job without necessarily think one's current job is total shit-work.
I'm in a white collar profession now and glad of it. That doesn't mean that I think my earlier jobs were crap, and are only done by losers.
False dichotomies make convenient political arguments, but not good ones.
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Dead On!
I recently wrote a post on my barackobama.com blog: http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/1337/gGCjLT
I am completely incensed by this elitist issue. I sure hope a presidential candidate has a Harvard Degree or equivalent. When a president has to negotiate a trade deal, or faces some kind of international crisis, I hope he has done the intellectual work beforehand to deal with it effectively (and we've seen the consequences of this deficit in our current commander-in-chief). In accordance with a Harvard degree goes a certain kind of lifestyle, of course. I think we're all familiar with the type: shops at Whole Foods, buys designer clothes, Liberal, intellectual, etc. I mean what epoch do we live in. It's a globalized,24/7 world where a large corporation won't even interview an executive unless they speak multiple languages and has at least a master's degree. I mean who are you going to vote for president: Henry McDougal, president of the Coal Miner's Union Local 127 in Blacksburg VA? Nothing on union guys or Appalachian folk, but it's a different world out there. It's not 1921 anymore.
Why should anyone have to apologize for that, especially someone with Barack Obama's background. As if George Stephanopoulos, or Maureen Dowd, shop at Wal-Mart.
But there's a certain, albeit small, segment of the American populace that has no love for secular intellectualism. They disdain the so-called "Limousine Liberals", and Hollywood et. al. So they go with the Republican who they feel they can have a beer with. Who disingenuously sides with their anti-intellectualism while he sends his own kids to Yale. Who stokes the flame of their fears by saying these liberals want to take their guns and their God away. "Why they're all brie-eatin' organic-buyin' hippies who want to raise your taxes." While he sells them all out once he gets into office, for his true benefactors: very rich people and the corporatinists who are all corporationy ;)
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Why change?
I don't want a president that is an elitist. I want someone I'd enjoy having a beer with. That's the only qualication that should be used when deciding on a candidate. After all it's served us well these past 7 years. Why change?
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Shark!
After a half dozen tries, TT finally makes the jump. Buh-bye!
elite -- connotation often good
elitist -- connotation usually bad
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bearpaw1
I was thinking of Bob Edwards biography of Edward R Murrow. Murrow himself made that comment. He was about as liberal as they come, by the way. You there's nothing innately ennobling about being working class or working poor. It's usually the trust fund communists though who tell you it is. Digging coal, felling trees, picking tobacco are generally things people want and try to rise above. But you're happy with that, more power to you.
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@ Allie_ @ Timelagged
@Allie_
I'm with you that we want our leaders to be our betters. It's the words that are actually causing the problem here. "elite" is typically taken to mean basically "better," while "elitist" means snobby, like a jerk. Kind of like the difference between "authoritative" (knows her stuff) and "authoritarian" (loves bossing people around).
@Timelagged
I'm exaggerating a bit saying Sarkozy is blue collar. My point is that Sarkozy, like Obama, is a bit of a mismatch for his culture's image. Americans drink beer and listen to Aerosmith, while Obama appreciates good wine and Debussy. The French appreciate good wine and Debussy; Sarkozy goes for beer and Aerosmith.
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Love it-was this Joan Walsh approved???
Sorry, couldn't help being, uh, "bitter". If I were to stop reading Salon because of Joan's pro-Clinton bias I might miss This Modern World-every single week you capture exactly what I'm thinking, only much wittier. Thank you!
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Who is less elite?
John Edward's wife wrote a terriffic editorial about the current state of elections in this Sunday's Times. Just as some nations may not have the requisite informed/educated populace to allow for democratic elections, some nations may devolve to the point where the people lose their right to directly elect their candidates. It has become a twisted popularity/morality contest. The Democrats foresaw this development and thus opted for the "super-delegate" exit clause to keep the decision away from "we the people" to the delegates whose votes are "more equal than others".
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In so called 'emerging' countries
Where the only requisite for a vote is having a purple thumb, they elect whomever screams at them the loudest and promises them either the biggest bag of free goodies and/or flaming meat cleaver death to their enemies. And that's if they bother to vote at all. Salon's favorite madman, the President of Iran, won his previous election, for the mayor of Tehran with a whopping 6% voter turnout. Clearly no one believes this moron except for his tools in the liberal west.
NOT being an elite doesn't necessarily serve the interests of democracy and enlightened freedom either. I'd say it's a mixture of filthy rabble and brie munching aesthetes.
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@clamshell Huh again
I'm exaggerating a bit saying Sarkozy is blue collar. My point is that Sarkozy, like Obama, is a bit of a mismatch for his culture's image. Americans drink beer and listen to Aerosmith, while Obama appreciates good wine and Debussy. The French appreciate good wine and Debussy; Sarkozy goes for beer and Aerosmith.
Nicolas Sarkozy may not be the farthest thing from blue collar that you'll find in France, but he's awfully close to it. He was raised by royalty in perhaps the richest town in Paris, just adjacent to Paris, where he became mayor. I know it well. You've mistaken the critiques of some of his popular tastes to mean that he's some sort of working class guy but nothing could be farther from the truth. For one thing it doesn't translate, just as Americans hearing that he's on "the right" gives them the mistaken idea that his right and our right are the same or even similar. They're not.
What gets criticized often in France is how he takes vacations with billionaire friends and is photographed on their enormous yachts. In Antibes. Or Monaco. It's the blatant display of exclusive wealth that they find distateful for the most part, which is more frowned upon by the French than here. When he's reffered to as "The American" that's what they're getting at, since that's one of the big differences, how Americans are seen there as unihibited displayers of lurid amounts of wealth.
There is virtually nothing "blue collar" about any of it.