Recently I've been more aware of the increasingly popular and derogatorily muttered name that conservative media has given many of the left-leaning members of society:
That's me! From an old article quoting a conservative interest group's advert during the last rounds of elections: "Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs." Hey now... I like lattes (or Breve-Lattes to be exact), I love sushi, practically everyone in my hometown drove a volvo when I was growing up, and I also happen to have pierced ears. Rather than vilify something as tasty and benign as coffee or sushi, these folks should just bring back the term "Yankee", since that's really what they mean. The thing that really gets me about the idea of elitism is that somehow only Liberals can be elite. If (just as an example) a conservative man graduates from both Yale and Harvard, avoids military service, gets a wrap-sheet for substance-abuse related arrests and then becomes president, how on earth is that not the very definition of 'elite' with respect to all the negative connotations bred by the right-wing of this country?! Maybe it's ok to have all those advantages, as long as you're an annoying prick that's dumb as bricks. I personally would be thrilled to have someone who could be called a Liberal Elite as president. Wikipedia has a great article on this, which states, "In Thomas Frank's 'What's the Matter with Kansas?' the idea of a liberal elite is suggested to be similar to the character of Emmanuel Goldstein in the George Orwell book Nineteen-Eighty Four, the fictional hated enemy of the people. Frank argues that anger directed towards this perceived enemy is what keeps the conservative coalition together." ...interesting interpretation.
~t
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