Posted on 07/19/2010 7:19:00 AM PDT by dennisw
2) Nature. The cultural elite class tends to romanticize nature, since it has little contact with it. Energy Secretary Steven Chu cheaply announces that California farms will dry up and blow away, with no clue how the tomatoes in his salad or the lamb chops on his plate are grown, cleaned, shipped and land in his mouth.
The more we dont clean and eat the fish we catch, the more we dont know an apple from a cherry tree, so the more we idolize something like a three-inch Delta smelt and shut down 500,000 acres of icky distant irrigated land to ensure the minnow-like, but beloved, fish has enough oxygenated water in the California delta.
I think that instead of SAT camp or a summer tutorial in estuary biophysics, it would be far better to assign Jason to apprentice with Motts septic service or Wrights tree-trimming.
3) Muscularity. An elite is often characterized as staying fit entirely by the workout, the gym, the jog never by chain sawing, digging, climbing, or hammering. Yet here too arises contradiction. The elite, being largely progressive, champion the muscular classes to the degree they can stay distant from them. Having good abs by crunching is far different from having big arms by using a five-foot long pneumatic drill. Expect the more cerebral our jobs, the more paranoid we will become about diet, fitness, and appearance, and the more we will romanticize, fear, and separate ourselves from those who work with their muscles. Yet get off a Massey-Ferguson after 11 hours, and one does not care how one looks only how many grape stakes the disc took out. Not so after coming home from running a foundation or a newsroom in Washington. Much of modern elite neuroticism derives from the combination of not working physically with the desire to look as if one did.
4) Gender. Here I am worried, as I have expressed previously, about the marked differences in the way our cultural elite express themselves. Hollywood offers an instructive example. Why cant any of our actors talk like a Humphrey Bogart, Glenn Ford, Lee Marvin, Henry Fonda, James Stewart, Bill Holden, or Gregory Peck? Im not asking for Jack Palance or Fess Parker, just a normal male mainstream voice. I know there are Al Pacinos and Robert De Niros, but they too seem to fade before the new wave of DiCaprios. Elites talk (and probably sound) like the freedmen in Petroniuss Satyricon.
Todays males voice is often far more feminine than that of 50 years ago. Sort of whiney, sort of nasally, sort of fussy. Being overexact, sighing, artificially pausing, all that seems part of the new elite parlance. In terms of vocabulary, the absolute (hes no damn good, shes a coward, he ran the business to hell) is avoided. Pejoratives and swearing resemble adolescent temper tantrums rather than threats that might well presage violence.
5) Logic. There is little logic among the cultural elite, maybe because there is little omnipresent fear of job losses or the absence of money, and so arises a rather comfortable margin to indulge in nonsense. The idea that taxes cause scarcity, and subsidy abundance is a foreign concept. The notion that entitlements create dependency is considered Neanderthal. Tough penalties supposedly do not deter crime. Abroad, military preparedness or deterrence pales in comparison to soft diplomatic power and clever talking. Borrowing trillions is stimulus and need not quite be paid back. In other words, take a deep breath and imagine the opposite of everything you know by experience to be true, and you have mostly the worldview of the sheltered cultural elite, who navigate in rather protected channels and not in the open seas of the real world.
Sissy male movie stars!! That’s why we love the rare manly guy like Jack Bauer ...
That’s why people liked the gangster series on HBO. The hero may have been a bad man, but he was a man at least.
There is little logic among the cultural elite, maybe because there is little omnipresent fear of job losses or the absence of money, and so arises a rather comfortable margin to indulge in nonsense.
This is the bone cruncher comment. Luxury created the nonsense that the elite indulge in. In fact, luxury helped support the hippies and liberal left since the 60s. Imagine Leonard Bernstein inviting the black panthers to his cocktail party if he had to put in a 16 hour work day on a pneumatic drill? No doubt his music would also be different too. But the salient point is that America is prosperous enough to put up with idiocy of all sorts. Once the prosperity runs out so will the liberal idiocy.
One other sad thing about the elite is that they look to the lower classes to follow fashion and ape the street life subculture with its filthy language. They dont lead. They are hedonistic followers who are constantly lowering the bar on culture because of their white guilt. They feel they are guilty of everything and there is a natural resentment that is built up over time, especially to parental authority that said dont become fascists. We fought them in the war. So, guess what? They become fascists. Spoiled children they are dictating a we are the world idiocy in an unprecedented time of luxury.
“I fixed the sink, replaced the entire toilet (it was beyond repair), and fixed the basement wiring. All over one weekend. She was amazed. I was amazed by that.”
I’m going to guess she was able to fix your plumbing as well?
Excellent read. VDH gets another thumbs up.
Under socialist Humanism's central planning only the elite will decide for the many.The precarious control of man by man is inimical to the Humanist worldview. Man, who must "save himself," must be in absolute control of all aspects of his universe.
Today’s left wing philosophy is all based on relativity. Post modernist thought rejects any type of absolute. They claim that it is all based on Einstein’s theory of relativity, that perspective is everything and anyone who insists on absolute facts are unenlightened rubes. Consensus substitutes for scientific proof, when facts are no longer facts, but simply a different perspective.
font color=blue>Hegel's dialectic. For the first time, I think that I am beginning to understand the thought process that drives the far left. What appears so contradictory and hypocritical, the left simply views as relativity.
Another terrific article by VDH. And I think that is why I’m attracted to people like Sarah Palin. THose who have gotten their hand dirty (as I have in many of my earlier career paths). The been there. done that, capable labor, tradespeople, craftsmen, worker bees. This one resonsated with me, thanks for posting it.
Sarah Palin has never run a business, was a mediocre governor, and should go back to baking cookies for her bastard grandchild.
Lovely. She and her husband were commercial fishermen, one of the toughest and most dangerous jobs there is. And she accomplished a good deal as governor. Nice comment regarding her grandson.
Such class you’re demonstrating, shame its all low.
He also maintains roots in the land. He still runs and works on the family farm -- growing raisins in the San Joaquin Valley. He has an appreciation of and an affinity for manual labor.
Thus, he is uniquely equipped to discuss not only the merits of Satyricon, but of various chain saws.
Indeed, his perspective is broader than most.
I think I read somewhere that he was a democrat at some point in his life.
He is a gentleman and a scholar....and as you pointed out has worked the soil at the family vineyard.
What is happening to this nation today goes beyond party politics...its a mentality that reeks of being ruled by ignorance, emotion and hate.
It's not so much Democrat vs Republican...or liberal vs conservative...it's Washington vs the rest of us.
It just so happens that most of Washington is liberal and Democrat...
From your ‘name’ I wonder if you are an Oklahoman? I was born in Tulsa...though I make my home in Texas.
If Texas decides to secede I have often thought we should take Oklahoma with us. LOL!
And I, too, live in Texas.
Best place in the world to be from. And to live.
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