I used to get upset over stuff like this. I mean, deeply, awfully upset. Now, I see it for what it is. It's a distraction. Even commenting on this or that part of it lends it more credibility than it deserves. It is a way for the right to distract folks from the fact that our economy is in the toilet right now, and Republicans, poised to gain serious ground in a couple weeks, have no real plan to change that fundamental reality.
They have plans. Sure they do. If you listen close enough, some have let slip what will happen if they take over even one House of Congress. It will be the Clinton era all over again. Investigate. Demand documents. Sling charges in the press without foundation or evidence. Keep the Obama Administration off balance as the Republicans even try to bring up the "I" word. Again.
All this other stuff? Phony elites who eat arugula and don't watch NASCAR? It's a way, yet again, to stoke fear. It really isn't worth getting all upset over.
Consider the sources. Charles Murray. The Washington Post op-ed page. Really, that's all that needs to be said. The specifics of the article may have changed, but the central point is the same as it ever was: Here's something shiny to distract people from their real problems. Here are the ones who are the source of our misery. They aren't in touch with real Americans. They practice pilates, but don't know who Jimmie Johnson is. They went to Ivy League schools and intermarry, instead of going to community college and staying in small town (read "real") America.
It's crap, from beginning to end. It was when Dean Acheson was derided as a communist dupe by Joe McCarthy because Acheson - a refined, educated Canadian national - held McCarthy in contempt. It was BS when Adlai Stevenson was called an egghead. It matters no more now than it did when anti-war protesters during the Vietnam era were called elitists out of touch with the "silent majority" of Americans by the Nixon Administration.
What really counts is this - the country is in a fix and we need to all pull together, stop whining and bitching and moaning and cowering and actually do stuff to make it better. It's easier, I guess, to get mad at some guy who went to a better school and has never read a Left Behind book (and, oh, good Lord why did Murray have to bring up that sequence of sado-masochistic misanthropy?) than, you know, to actually do stuff to make all our lives better.
UPDATE: Via The New Inquiry comes news of the magazine n+1's latest issue. It concerns the sociology of the hipster. Suffice it to say I agree with the contribution from NI's editor.
The problem with hipsters seems to me the way in which they reduce the particularity of anything you might be curious about or invested in into the same dreary common denominator of how “cool” it is perceived to be. Everything becomes just another signifier of personal identity. Thus hipsterism forces on us a sense of the burden of identity, of constantly having to curate it if only to avoid seeming like a hipster.Hipsters are those folks who pronounce that Dutch impressionist's name "Van Goch" with that fricative at the end, rather than "Van Go". Hipsters are those who prefer 1940's noir, explaining in fine detail the nuances of various films, to pretty much anything. Hipster women drink their vodka straight. Hipster men know which year produced the best wines in the best vineyards. Hipsters vacation in Tuscany.
They are, in other words, that same elite that Charles Murray whines about. They are an "Other" against whom we can define what is "real" or "true" about our own social identity.
Again, while fascinating in a theoretical way, it concerns that which isn't really all that important at the moment. Hipsters certainly pretend to an insouciance toward politics and economics; the view of them as "above it all" is part both of their appeal and the anger directed at those so labeled. Since no one, really, is above it all, it is an entirely fictional construct.
Which doesn't mean there isn't much goodness to read within the pages of n+1.
