September 26, 2008 1:41 PM

 

What Brand Makes You Feel Comfortable?
The role ofan unexamined prejudice in modern life

We all know the categories of prejudice that are discussed, and re-hashed endlessly, in contemporary life: racism, sexism ageism. We have made a secular liturgy of discussing these issues, and, no doubt, some good has come from it. As a tail-end baby-boomer I absorbed the principle, taught very early on, about the dangers of stereotyping. If our generation wasn't going to get anything else right on the ethical/moral front, we were going to end prejudice--at least end the sort of prejudice that was directed against the approved list of victims.

The problem with departing from a more comprehensive standard, the Golden Rule, is that this narrow goal created an entitled set of the oppressed and it put classes of people at war with each other--many of whom were never either oppressors or victims. If anything, the prejudice police created more prejudice, and they ignored other, more tangible forms of bigotry.

Just the other day, Katie Couric conducted an interview with Governor Sarah Palin. Whether you like Governor Palin or not, consider Katie's weird editorial agenda: She refused to refer to Sarah Palin as "Governor" Palin. (One correspondent observed that perhaps Governor Palin should have referred to Katie as "Sugar.") Here's a research project for you students of the American media: has there been a Couric-Obama interview? How many times did Katie refer to Senator Obama as "Barack?"

That unchallenged bigotry in American life today is elitism. Katie Couric, and her ilk, are part of a self-diagnosed, self-worshipping elite. I know something about this mentality because I was once an abject slave to it. I remember thinking, as a young college numb-skull, that the real answers were known by people who went to Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Berkeley. Elitists were Anglicans, or agnostics, or atheists, or Jews who didn't take their religion seriously. Elitists were lawyers, judges, physicists, investment bankers. Elitist art usually had some connection to an academic master of fine arts program. Elitists were progressive Democrats, limousine liberals, political lesbians, union apologists (as long as their family money wasn't threatened by organized labor). Elitists were friends of the earth. Elitists were usual divorced at least once. Elitists were apt to start a sentence with the words, "the latest thinking is," or "Studies show.."

Elitists recoil at patriotic displays or talk of God. Elitists are apt to say, "it really isn't that simple," even if it really is that simple. Elitists are people like Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, Barbara Walters, Charlie Gibson, Allan Dershowitz, Oliver Stone. You don't have to be a snob to be an elitist; you can even be sort of low-culture. Chris Matthews and Rosie O'Donnel are elitists. Elitists, at base, have a very deep faith in the status quo, in the notion that the experts really know what they are talking about. Elitists tend to hate guns, because they feel only the "experts" should use guns. With a few exceptions, elitists are likely to have utter disdain for holistic medicine, chiropractic, or anything that even remotely questions the theory of evolution.

John McCain can travel among the elitists because his dad was an admiral and he graduated from Annapolis and his wife is American gentry, with at least 2nd generation wealth. John also knows how not to offend the elitists by taking up some of their nutty causes, (global warming, open borders.).

Governor Sarah Palin, however, is a moose hunter. Elitists just do not shoot moose. It's hard to even imagine how an elitist could shoot a moose, unless it was part of a Dartmouth University $55,000 per head photography outfitting trip, led by Bill Moyers, where proceeds benefit teenagers with sexual identity disorders. Governor Palin attends a Bible-believing church; this violates the Elitist abridged, two page version of scripture. Governor Palin has an intact family, not a perfect family, but a family that owes up to its own mistakes, (without trips down to Planned Parenthood to kill off the unwanted young' ns.) Elitists really can't stand power of conviction: anything that places people within the context of family threatens the Elitists desire for a world where no one has to answer to anyone but the government for their sustenance.

Not all elitists love the state, but what they have in common is a sense that there are approved sources of information: The New England Journal of Medicine, The New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly. When Tom Brokaw lamented that Dan Rather was a victim of "internet jihad," he was demonstrating classic elitism: even if an elitist is a blatant liar, only another elitist can expose him, not some amateur laptop internet sleuth. I mean really.

..So when Katie Couric can't bring herself to call Sarah Palin, "Governor Palin," she's really saying "I can't bring myself to call this woman a governor; she rushed my sorority and we didn't pledge her."

More of the Farm Journal -- September 25, 2008