Posted on 10/18/2008 4:05:48 PM PDT by flyfree
Why is Bill Ayers a respectable member of the upper middle class and Sarah Palin contemptible?
Pour yourself a Johnnie Walker Black and remember. The presidential campaign was going to be about sex--the sex of the inevitable winning candidate. Then it was going to be about race. We dreamed we would atone for slavery and the Berlin Airlift, impress Europe and charm the Arab world. But the undecided voters who will determine the winner are no longer interested in race or sex. They are looking at social class. Which ticket best expresses the values and tastes of the upper-middle-class--and captivates the rest of us who follow the lead of the upper-middles?
The class argument is why the Bill Ayers strategy won't do. In the sex and race eras, it would have worked nicely. Obama's longtime working collaboration with the radical educational theorist and retired terrorist would dramatize his carefully but hastily discarded political radicalism. But no longer. The anti-Ayers publicists are quite right about Ayers's malignity and Obama's connivance. But when they try to explain what Ayers has done in the past and still wants to do--turn schools into nurseries of revolution, make leftist views a condition for becoming a teacher, promote dictatorship, and glorify violence--they injure not help their cause. Class will always trump politics. Being the first in one's family to adopt liberal political sentiments or move to New York City means a step into the middle class, for most Americans, and an increase in social status. More extreme political radicalism lifts one a step or two higher.
(Excerpt) Read more at weeklystandard.com ...
Nailed it.
And why is Tim McVeigh contemptible and Ayers exalted as a friend of founder of the elect another Hussein movement?.
Interesting—a new perspective on a situation which has baffled me
Bill Ayers is probably the classic example of the pampered and spoiled little kid from a rich family who depended on Daddy’s fortune and connections to pull him out of the scrapes and really big-time trouble he got into with the law.
The popular conception is that the son of a rich family is also a classic pseudo-Republican, and spends his time ruining the lives of others. But in this instance, the son-of-a-rich had chosen to emulate Ernesto (Che) Guereva, another example of the privileged wealthy pretending to be a “fighter for the people” but was in reality an extravagantly reckless and apparently bloodthirsty sociopath. The good thing is that Che was run to ground and executed in a little rough jungle justice in Bolivia, the bad thing is that he is held to be some kind of hero by those who were not there.
Che did not understand the basis of what had to be done to improve the lives of the campesinos, he thought smashing what feeble economic system that existed would be enough. But he had no acceptable substitute to put in its place, as the Bolivian natives were not Chinese, with at least the rudiments of civilization in their lives, and an appreciation that hard work was the basis of self-improvement. The Bolivian natives did not want “improvement”, they only wanted the foreign usurpers out of the land where their forebearers had dwelt for millenia. It was a race thing, not economics, that motivated them. And Che was of the wrong race.
Well-wriiten and fairly convincing, though it doesn’t capture everything about this most unusual of all elections. The writer himself is obviously a member of that same conniving upper-middle class, but at least he recognizes its problems in the same way that WF Buckley (and not his pathetic son) did. There is no question that the most “radical” or at least independent thinkers in the election are Palin and McCain (in that order).
Noonan and others criticize Palin because she does not articulate a “philosophy”, at least to their liking. But they miss the point. Palin embodies an authentic American experience that is quickly vanishing; Noonan and her ilk are more interested in people who can talk about things like rugged individualism—they have no idea what to do when confronted by someone who actually is a rugged individualist. Even the great Reagan was, after all, from Hollywood.
McCain may be the last President cut from the same cloth as Eisenhower; i.e., a military man from a military family. Not particularly partisan, but fiercely pragmatic and action-oriented. The last person on a national ticket with Palin’s unique credentials is, of course, Teddy Roosevelt. Compared to the Democrat ticket which is, well, just two mediocre lawyers who think that preening their media image is a form of public service, there is no comparison.
It isn’t just that McCain and Palin have better character than their opponents. They have character out the wazoo, whereas Obama and Biden have no character to speak of at all—they are interchangable with any two leftist lawyers you might run into at a local political function. But, as the author says, they are established members of the upper-middle class (as is every member of the MSM).
This is one reason why we need to go go NUCLEAR about Odinga. Ayers can be brushed off as, “Well, he *is* a professor now.” Show the video of people with machetes. That scares the CRAP out of people. Ayers is a rich white American guy. Odinga is a third world radical.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8QcpdUtxNQ
The Odinga video had 1000 hits when we started spreading it, it’s up to 260,000 now with the counter being stuck at various times.
Because a reference to an Oscar Wilde character can say a lot more about a person than a few plain sentences can to someone who has read Oscar Wilde. The same may be true of a reference to a Dickens character or even a Seinfeld character.
The reason many great works of literature have the status they do is people have recognized, sometimes over several generations, that they skillfully express a great deal of truth about people, society, or the like.
Because the city slicker isn’t used to dealing with reality, only hypothetical and easy.
That one word in your statement sums it up, “nobility”. That is who these people think they are.
Yes but your comments are better in both categories! I detect an expert.
What makes you think that? There certainly is an upper class in this country. They just tend to stay out of sight.
Quite astute. Something I had thought privately but could not verbalize to anyone, since most people are in denial about our social class system.
Bump!
Some of them simply think they are royalty and nobility and the rest of us are just serfs.
An economist would say that the upper class, whether European, British, or American, lives principally on inherited money. The upper middle class or bourgeoisie was historically defined as the people who were rich, maybe in some cases richer than the upper class, but they earned all or most of their money. This would include successful physicians, attorneys, and business people, those who might have inherited some money but had to work hard and acquire quite a bit of education in order to be successful. So most of the rich people who are visible to us tend to be members of the upper middle class. Most people are unaware that there is an upper class in this country because its members are very reticent and private, for the most part.
Of course, class is not really a question of how much money you have, but how you spend whatever you have, what your tastes, values, and aspirations are, how you live, and how you conduct yourself. Our Founding Fathers may have done away with a hereditary nobility but they couldn’t stamp out human ambition.
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