Monday, September 27, 2004

POT, KETTLE

James Lileks, commenting on this NYT Magazine article on bloggers, displays his special brand of cornpone elitism:

The Sunday Times is the weekly sermon: let us reinforce your world view, your sense of belonging to the Thinking Class, the Special Ones. Let the Red Staters spend Sunday morning in itchy church clothes at Perkins, dumping syrup all over their pancakes and yelling at little Lurleen not to pour salt down her baby brother’s jumper; you’re in your elegant spare little apartment with a cup of coffee (frothed on top; sprinkle of nutmeg) and a pastry from that wonderful place around the corner (okay, it’s an Au Bon Pain – hell, they’re all Bon Pain now) and there’s some light jazz on the radio. Morning jazz, if you had to give the genre a name. Anyway, it’s a sunny fall morning – well, noonish. Now comes the capstone moment when you lay the slab of the Times in your lap and begin the autoposy of the week. Scan the A section headlines - yes, yes, yes, appalling. Scan the metro: your eyes glaze. The arts section – later. Travel – Greece again? Good for Greece. Six pounds of classifieds: discard. No comics . . . there was always comics on Sunday back home. But that was IOWA, for heaven’s sake, what else would you expect but Blondie and Ziggy and the rest . . . ah.


And on and on like this. There's no denying that Lileks is a talented writer, but it would probably help if he thought things through a little more, maybe asked himself how, exactly, holding up the stereotypical (in his mind) urbanite for ridicule supports his presmise that urbanites hold rural types in contempt?

Honestly, the only urbanites I've ever met who hold rural America in contempt are urbanites who grew up in rural America.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I have to admit, I'm a born and bred urbanite and, yes, I hold rural America in contempt. And if you don't, it's only because you haven't ever been forced to ride in a pickup with Brooks & Dunn blaring for four hours straight.

-Tim

p.s. And I also hold all of rural America personally responsible for mid-80s rise of both John Cougar-Mellencamp & Bruce Springsteen -- each an unforgivable pox upon this great land of ours!