The Credentialed Gentry and The Unpersuaded Yahoos
19th October 2010
Beatin’ on the Crust:
Is there an elite class in America, and if yes, what renders it so? Is it mere money or Ivy League polish? Is it because they have great social and political connections and what we used to refer to as their “rolodex”? Is it education? Social skills? Empathy? Enlightenment? Or does one become elite simply by dint of one’s ability to sustain an illusion—to fool oneself and others—that one is a counter-cultural egalitarian, while living what formerly would have been thought a country-club life?
And maybe that is what defines an elite: the lip-curled reproach to anything that has come before this privileged and smug generation—tradition, faith, heroic self-denial—and the illusion that their disdain is somehow a broader and more enlightened “love.”
For the most part, the “yahoo” non-elites do not begrudge the gentry their private jets, their private clubs, and their private schools. They do, however, begrudge them the superior dismissal of their values, and the constant attempts to control how others get to live their lives.
The ineducable masses begrudge the hectoring about their taste for “gas guzzlers,” from people who ride in limos. They dislike being dismissed as “provincial” or “parochial” by people who only associate with others of the same neighborhood and mindset. They are weary of being portrayed as less compassionate, less well-meaning, gosh darn it just lesser people because they believe in giving an equal-opportunity hand-up, rather than an impossible-to-sustain equal-hand-out.
Which is why they’ve been building fortresses. Castro lives in one, too.