Sunday, April 13, 2008

Obama elitist? I think not.

Obama recently made the mistake of treating Americans like they are adults, capable of hearing the truth, and said that decades of politicians refusing to address the economic issues affecting postindustrial communities had made the rural Pennsylvanians “bitter.”

Hillary and McCain’s campaigns immediately seized upon this statement to wax indignant about how Obama is “elitist,” “arrogant” and “condescending” to the average Americans. As if either one of those two fakers has come within body-odor-sniffing distance of an average American in the last 36 months without a full phalanx of cameramen on hand to capture the event for CNN.

Now I’m by no means an Obama supporter, but I would at least like to see the guy get criticized for the right things. And being “elitist” about rural Americans isn’t one of them.

I know that because I am myself a true and unrepentant elitist.

This might seem counterintuitive, considering that I don’t work and I live on a filthy boat. But I believe that cements my true elitism credentials.

Any condescending dick can feel superior while staring at the glittering city lights from his penthouse apartment after a hard day of hedge fund managing. But anyone that can simultaneously preserve an unbridled contempt for America’s rural working class while having to use a public shower has truly earned his stuck-up stripes.

Speaking as such an individual, I would never say that I think that rural Pennsylvanians are “bitter.”

First off, I’d say that I never actually bother to think about them at all. And that when I do, it is with a mixture of repugnance, contempt and the kind of fleeting pity that I feel watching a cockroach get flushed down a toilet.

I drove through that state once, and saw these rural areas in question --- a region that I would characterize as Arkansas, plus heavy industry, minus heavy industry.

To my mind, any ambulatory adult who would willingly choose to inhabit such a dreary, interminable, monotonous shit-plain of ticky-tacky houses, shuttered factories and Applebee’s-infested strip malls deserves whatever heaping helping of misery their life hands them. Case closed.

But in my more charitable moments, I find their adherence to a hardscrabble blue-collar ethic long after the blue-collar jobs have been shipped to Asian sweatshops pathetically touching. Kind of like the delusions of Texans who sincerely believe, to the tips of their ostrich-skin boots, that they are real live cowboys while commuting to their job at the Dr. Pepper bottling plant.

If pressed, I would say that I wish that these rural Pennsylvanians would develop the intellectual capacity to stop electing the fascistic plutocrats who chant the voters’ favorite superstition platitudes to them as a soporific to facilitate the plutocrats’ systematic pauperization of the American middle class for corporate profit.

Alternatively, I wish that these individuals would develop the courage to leave the soul-killing patch of sooty, quasi-urbanized slum-rot that their family has festered in a full generation after the economic viability of the region has vanished. Just leave and disperse throughout the nation, like a fart spreading into a room until you can’t smell it anymore.

But if they can’t do either, I simply wish that they would die.

Die as quickly as possible and in a way that highlights the cretinous values that these losers have created for themselves in the absence of intellectual, spiritual, artistic or social attainments.

I wish their sons would break their backs copying moves they watched on backyardwrestling.com. I wish their daughters would catch the AIDS that an abstinence-only sex education never taught them to prevent. I wish the fathers’ hearts would explode from the daily intake of pure hog offal, honeycombed with visible crystals of sodium nitrate, that those voracious garbage-eaters refer to as “Scrapple.”

What’s more, I wish that all these calamities would all happen on the same day.

I wish the mom would have to load her suffering brood into the gargantuan, gas-guzzling SUV that the family’s obesity, bad taste and unreturned loyalty to American auto manufacturers inspired them to buy. And on the way to the hospital --- which, by the way, only practices the strange, backward kind of medicine which a curriculum of Intelligent Design permits --- that family’s stupendous fat-weight would cause the tires, purchased cheaply at the local Wal-Mart, to burst at their Chinese-slave-labor-created seams. And their hideous car would overturn and strew the entire family’s bloated, lifeless corpses across that state’s poorly-maintained highways.

Lastly, I wish that I would happen to be driving my well-designed, reliable imported car through Pennsylvania on this very same day, perhaps shuttling between music festivals and book-reading events in the state’s two habitable urban oases of Philadelphia and Pittsburg.

As I drive past the roadside carnage, I would slow down for an instant to toss the tepid dregs of that day’s third half-caff soy latte on their fat, ugly, pathetic carcasses.

Then I would accelerate briskly, leaving their rotting corpses in my dust like so much blubbery road-kill, an NPR podcast of “Fresh Air” blasting out all four open windows.

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There? See the difference? That’s what true elitism looks like. I didn't use the word "bitter" once. Give Obama a break.