"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."

                --Archilochus

Glenn Reynolds:
"Heh."

Barack Obama:
"Impossible to transcend."

Albert A. Gore, Jr.:
"An incontinent brute."

Rev. Jeremiah Wright:
"God damn the Gentleman Farmer."

Friends of GF's Sons:
"Is that really your dad?"

Kickball Girl:
"Keeping 'em alive until 7:45."

Hired Hand:
"I think . . . we forgot the pheasant."




I'm an
Alcoholic Yeti
in the
TTLB Ecosystem



Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Classless Warfare

I know I sound like a crank when I rail against "our political masters," and speak of them as if they were members of the peerage, and it was 1650.  I think we've become inured to it; we've been conditioned by having to fawn over and flatter petty civil servants into doing their job at the DMV or the hall of records; we're now used to the threatening moral lecture from the state trooper.  We've come to assume that "the Government" should do something about fat kids, unmowed lawns, and expensive health insurance.

So we should not be surprised when those with power and the trappings of power come to feel self-important, remote, and entitled.  They are about the business of the abstract People, which busy-ness has no truck with some guy on the street.  "Voters" and "taxpayers" and "citizens" are mere theoretical concepts to our masters.  There is much to be said for the old fashioned ward boss, who knew it was part of his job to walk down the street and talk to regular people, listen to their problems, and make sure the street light and the pothole got fixed, and arrange for a loading zone in front of Angelo's deli.

Our masters now live in a bubble of entitlement in which they speak and we listen; where they dispense favors and we are grateful; where we approach with awe and tug our forelock.  We are to beg permission to approach the new nobility, and woe unto him who commits lèse majesté.


And, as if to make my point for me, the Washington Post's "Reliable Source" has this take: ". . . but who filmed it and why?" That is, was this a person entitled to speak with the Earl of Raleigh & Marquess of Fayetteville? Or instead some cheeky bumpkin?

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