That’s funny — but it strikes me more like a Monty Python gig than something Benny Hill would have done. After all, half the appeal of ol’ Benny was his supporting cast of scantily dressed Brit beauties.
Actually, I had a darker vision — Madame Defarge in “A Tale of Two CITIES.”
More to the point, I experienced the wrath of female textile hobbyists during my last newspaper job in Florida.
I rewrote a highly routine public service announcement for a quilting club. In this short — maybe three paragraph — item I referred to quilting as “a traditional rural handicraft.”
Well, you wouldn’t believe the hate calls I got. I can’t remember whether anyone called the ME (that’s managing editor in newspaper talk) demanding my dismissal, but it sure got nasty for a while.
Apparently, some of these quilters took extreme umbrage at the adjective “rural.”
No, they insisted, quilting is modern and sophisticated, or words to that effect.
You see where I’m going with this. Even a decade before the Trump revolution, many of the elite vs. deplorable fissures in our culture were already there for anyone who cared to notice.
My mistake was to apply North Carolina values in southwest Florida. If I had still been in N.C., describing anything as “rural” would have, if anything, gotten a positive response. Folks in N.C. may no longer live on the farm, but their parents or grandparents almost certainly did. Overall, real Southerners respect that heritage.
So much of the hatred in today’s politics has nothing to do with any particular issue, even an ongoing source of trouble like abortion.
It’s more a matter of tribalism, as the self-styled elite attempt to differentiate themselves from the common herd.
Simply, our culture — ever-more separated from faith, family, and tradition — breeds narcissists. And narcissists must have people to look down upon.
“Rural” taken as an insult— LOL.
I’ve long theorized that living in too much concrete, neon & exhaust fumes makes some people plumb stupid.