This Newsweek essay linked on Insty just reeks of tribalism. Amazing that a person so condescending and insulting gets to blame others for "this coarsened sensibility."
Update: Gerbeel's comment reminded me to link to this Iowahawk post Redness of Heart.
6 comments:
The key line is the lead of the penultimate paragraph: "Something deep and basic has changed in our country ..." Namely, the yahoos have stopped deferring to their betters, and it's not just "ours" any longer.
Every time I think the bicoastal knowledge class can't get any further estranged from the heartland, something like this oozes up.
This crunchy con who spent four hours today planting native plants I paid for in the local park and pulling invasive ivy, and who writes science fiction and goes to Rwanda responds to that man's contempt with disgust. Does he think I've not read Gullivar's Travels and therefore not know what a yahoo is?
As I am the offspring of a North-South marriage, having split my life into approximately equal parts between North and South, I have a dog in this hunt. Consider two issues: race and foreign policy.
In terms of race, which was historically the biggest difference between North and South, the North has won. At least the enlightened, tolerant part of the North has won. In 1958, 94% of white Americans disapproved of marriages between blacks and whites, which also indicates that such opinions were not at all restricted to the segregationist South. By 2007, that percentage had gone down to 19% of white Americans. Bull Connor lost, and he’s dead. George Wallace asked forgiveness. No, things aren’t perfect. But the Jim Crow South sure as hell lost this one.
The foreign policy that Bush espouses can find support in some of Kennedy’s speeches. Fifty years ago, Northern liberals were in favor of a vigorous foreign policy, and did not apologize to tyrants. There is a reason for the existence of the phrase “Jackson Democrats,” a phrase which does not refer to Andrew of Tennessee, but to Henry of Washington state.
Take the issue of Assad and Syria. The Assad clan has long been a thorn in the side of US foreign policy, in addition to treating its own people brutally (Hama..). I doubt that fifty years ago liberal politicians from the North would make a pilgrimage to Damascus to pay homage to a third world terror-master tyrant such as Assad, to share their disagreement with Assad over US foreign policy, hoping that the US would be more accommodating to the likes of Assad, in contrast with John F Kerryman, Pelosi, and Dodd ( and David Duke).
With regard to foreign policy, it is not that the South has won, but rather that the Northern liberals have changed over the last 50 years. JF Kennedy and Henry Jackson could not be elected today as Democrats.
There is also a very big variation in the quality of journalism. Perhaps influenced by Watergate etc., some Merit Finalists and the like from my high school ended up as journalists.Best and Brightest. You might not agree with them, but you have to be on your toes.
Hirsch, on the other hand, comes across as a fool, as an ignorant yahoo with an upscale address. You do not have to be a rocket scientist, as the saying goes, to refute him. He comes across as dumber than a post. I figure that any journalist that I can take apart must be rather thick. Somewhat like the Groucho Marx and his club, perhaps.
In my own jingoistic, yahoo way, I'm hoping that this person is left in the parking lot of a biker bar, somewhere in Southeast Ohio, at about 2am on a Sunday morning.
Here's hoping there is a severe beating in his future.
gringo - not only JFK and Scoop Jackson, the more recent Joe Lieberman and Zell Miller couldn't get elected as Democrats.
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