Tuesday, April 27, 2004
Brooks is the worst kind of elitist
Giuseppe Abote writes:
Brooks talks about the whites residing in the non-coastal USA almost as though they were an indigenous people. So spiritual! So simple! So refreshingly candid and plain-spoken! We elites ought to be lashed for not being one of them! But of course, what Brooks (and Fineman et. al.) leave out is the fact that no such people really exist out there in the Midwest, that the whole thing is a figment of the elitist imagination. Or, better put, the whole story is a product of the imaginations of people who wish they were bona fide members of an elite group but know in their hearts that they don't belong and never will, probably because they are too stupid. So they clumsily unite themselves with a fictive non-elite "heartland" that "we elites" allegedly disdain--and the purpose of all of this is just so they can say "we elites," "we elites," "we elites" as though they actually belonged in the first place.
posted by Blicero : 4/27/2004 02:32:00 PM
Brooks talks about the whites residing in the non-coastal USA almost as though they were an indigenous people. So spiritual! So simple! So refreshingly candid and plain-spoken! We elites ought to be lashed for not being one of them! But of course, what Brooks (and Fineman et. al.) leave out is the fact that no such people really exist out there in the Midwest, that the whole thing is a figment of the elitist imagination. Or, better put, the whole story is a product of the imaginations of people who wish they were bona fide members of an elite group but know in their hearts that they don't belong and never will, probably because they are too stupid. So they clumsily unite themselves with a fictive non-elite "heartland" that "we elites" allegedly disdain--and the purpose of all of this is just so they can say "we elites," "we elites," "we elites" as though they actually belonged in the first place.
posted by Blicero : 4/27/2004 02:32:00 PM
