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WORD COUNT
662
MAY 7, 2008
MAYBE IT TAKES AN
ELITIST – by Donald Kaul
I have a confession
to make: I’m an elitist.
I may not have gone
to Harvard or Yale and I don’t belong to an exclusive club but I’m an
elitist nevertheless. Here are my credentials:
Things I don’t
like---snowmobiles, SUVs, chicken-fried steak, beer, bowling, pinochle,
supermarket tabloids, ultimate fighting, penultimate fighting, reality
TV, TV, the National Rifle Association, NASCAR, Rush Limbaugh.
Things I
like---opera, sports cars, oysters on the half-shell, dry white wine,
bridge, baseball, the New Yorker, martinis, theater, the early films of
Woody Allen and most of Bob Dylan.
Elitist, through and
through.
I make no apology for
it. It’s not easy, becoming an elitist, particularly when you’re not
born to it. I come from a working-class, immigrant family on the
near-northwest side of Detroit. The things I now like were foreign to
them, and to me for that matter. I had to learn to like them.
You think I went to
college so I could learn to bowl? I went to college so I could become
someone else, preferably Melvyn Douglas or William Powell, the guy in
the tuxedo who was always talking on a white telephone, which the waiter
had brought to his table.
You don’t get there
by playing a mean hand of pinochle.
You get there by hard
work. You think it’s easy, learning to like martinis (which on first
taste are indistinguishable from anti-freeze)? Or, my God, raw oysters?
It’s not a task for
the faint-hearted, but it’s worth the effort. Once you’re a
card-carrying member of the elite you can run with the best and
brightest, or the rich and famous, without making a fool of yourself.
(I must admit, however, that I haven’t yet had a tuxedo-clad waiter
bring a white telephone to my table. I guess I have to start hanging
out in better diners.)
I tell you all of
this to help you understand the rage I feel when I hear Barak Obama
being called an elitist as though it’s a bad thing. John McCain has
been particularly snotty about it, saying “elitist” as though it’s a
dirty word. This from a son and grandson of admirals.
In former times
people enjoyed looking up to their presidents and we had presidents like
Washington and Jefferson, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. Now we want
them to be our next-door neighbors and we get Carter, Clinton and the
Bushes.
The nomination battle
between Hillary and Barak has declined into a contest of personalities.
Hillary has done her best to make herself into Norma Rae while Barak has
struggled to make himself acceptable to people to whom he seems a
creature from Mars.
In reality, however,
the contest is one between the past and the future. Hillary is the
candidate of pinochle and bowling, Barak of blogging and basketball.
She is Rust Belt, he is Silicon Valley. He is the candidate of the
Internet, her supporters prefer talking things over at the corner café.
If Obama wins the
nomination, the choice will be even more stark. John McCain is stuck
back in the 19th century. His political philosophy is an amalgam of an
imperialist foreign policy and a laissez-faire economic style. He
doesn’t have a single idea William McKinley wouldn’t have been happy
with.
And yet the election
might well hinge on whose pastor we like the best.
We don’t have time
for this nonsense. We need an energy policy that confronts the serious
energy problems we face, one that dovetails with the environmental
concerns that are reaching crisis proportion.
We need a
transportation policy, one that takes our energy and environmental
policies into consideration, one that finds a prominent place for mass
transit.
We need a foreign
policy that makes sense. This taking on the entire Middle East, one war
at a time, just isn’t working out.
We need national
health insurance.
In short, we need a
president who will stop clinging to a largely imaginary past and embrace
the future.
Now.
--
Don Kaul is a
two-time Pulitzer Prize-losing Washington correspondent who, by his own
account, is right more than he's wrong. Email:
dkaul2@earthlink.net -- A photo of Donald Kaul is available
CLICK HERE
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