January 31, 2007
From the desk of Jane Galt:Here in the United States, the right has a tendency (once, but mostly no longer, found on the European right) to serve up a mixture of hostility to intellectuals, Hollywood, journalists, academics, and residents of big cities along with valorization of farmers, soldiers, and small-town life that I, at least, find remarkably uncongenial to the values of American Jewry. I rather doubt, at this point, that there's any actual anti-semitism lurking beneath this murky cauldron of anti-semitic tropes, but still, there they are. Or to put it another way, granting that pretty much nobody on the American right seems to hate Jews as such, pretty much everybody on the American right seems to hate the things that, in practice, American Jews do. While remaining unimpressed with the tendency of many on the American (and more on the European) left to see Israel as simultaneously the most evil state in human history and also the root cause of all evils everywhere in the world, I'm equally unimpressed with the Christian Zionist view that Israel must be supported in order to encourage all Jews everywhere to move there in order to hasten the end of the world as we know it.
The Irish aren't quite as city-loving, movie-making, academia-dominating a group as the Jews, but we're close. I'm certainly one of those coastal elite types that I hear ranting about, and yes, my friends, I do love a good triple venti skim latte.
But I find this logic a little weird. Do I really have to like things that I would otherwise despise, just because Jews do them? Does it make me a bad person to hold onto my distaste? Should our distaste for anti-semitism extend to those who have no animus towards Jews, but a style objection to six-pointed stars? Do I have to like female circumcision, arranged marriages, honour killings, and large, intrusive, and ineffective quasi-socialist states in order to prove that I don't hate Arabs?
Rural people hate city people for basically the same reasons everywhere, as far as I can tell: the social values required for living in a small community full of people who you've known forever are very different from those that work in a big place full of transient strangers. And the city slickers, being richer and closer to the centres of power, have somewhat more ability to enforce their values on the rest of the country. If there is less of this in Europe, it is probably because the Europeans don't have very much countryside left. Most of my New York friends find nothing odd or prejudiced about hating people in the south because they disagree with their way of life, and resent the need to compromise with them politically.
Posted by Jane Galt at January 31, 2007 5:47 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksthe right has a tendency (once, but mostly no longer, found on the European right) to serve up a mixture of hostility to intellectuals, Hollywood, journalists, academics, and residents of big cities
Yglesias might as well have said that there is right-wing hostility to liberals, liberals, liberals, liberals, and residents of big cities and valorization of conservatives, conservatives, and residents of small towns that is uncongenial to a an overwhelmingly liberal ethnic group that mostly lives in big cities.
What is there to say except "duh".
There's no significant right-wing hostility to *conservative* filmmakers, academics, intellectuals, and journalists. Its just that all four groups are at the moment overwhelmingly dominated by the Left. Last I checked it wasn't the right-wingers endlessly slamming Fox News and The Skeptical Environmentalist.
I'm equally unimpressed with the Christian Zionist view that Israel must be supported in order to encourage all Jews everywhere to move there in order to hasten the end of the world as we know it.
Dennis Praeger did an hour on his show where he asked evangelical Christians who supported Israel why they did so. Besides the reasons of national security, having a common enemy in the form of the jihadists who hate both the United States and Israel, and that’s it’s by far the most decent civilization in the Middle East, the callers who offered a religious reason said because they believed that the Israelites were the chosen people of God. Not a single one offered an “end times” explanation for their support.
You know, as a Baptist boy, I was always under the impression that the End Times had a pre-arranged date and that the will of God on this matter was pretty immutable.
Doesn't it mean, then, that the end times are nigh (or not nigh) no matter which policy the 700 club supports?
I'm using fiction here as an example, but I seem to recall that in the beginning of "Left Behind", Russia launches an attack on Israel that is vaporized. (I could be remembering wrong; maybe it was that it ran into an invisible wall kinda like the initial Rebel attack on the Death Star in 'Return of the Jedi') That God, I would think, doesn't depend on the American right's position on Israel as his kitchen timer for the End of Days. I'm not sayin', I'm just sayin.
As an Evangelical myself (born and raised, the whole bit), I can say that only the lunatic fringe* of Christian fundamentalists would consider it possible to force the second coming by helping Israel. Indeed, the idea seems a touch blasphemous.
*Yes, I do realize that to many people, anything in the Evangelical camp is a lunatic fringe.
Jane,
Shouldn't that read: "The social values required for living in a small community full of people who you've known forever are very different from those that work you can get away with in a big place full of transient strangers"?
Klug, not only that, but also: it's just as clearly stated--if not more so--that we aren't going to know the date ahead of time. I think this adds equal weight to the pre-ordained time aspect (Hal Lindsey notwithstanding--anybody remember him?)
Oy veh! My comment is a bit hard to make sense of, because of what might be a bug in MT. The word work in the quoted sentence is supposed to be stricken out. I very carefully did a preview, because there's no comprehensive list provided (as far as I can tell) of which html tags are permitted in comments. In the preview, it appeared with strikeouts; then I hit post, but wouldn't you know, they don't show up.
I'd say stripping on set of tags on preview, and a different set of tags on post, really is a bug, eh?
Is this "push" or "pull"? After all, intellectuals, Hollywood, journalists, and academics aren't noted for their love of the Right (however that's defined), so few on the Right will regard them as worthy of "valorization". After all, a skilled combat soldier is far more likely to be "right-friendly" than a crusading journalist, Oscar winner, or rockstar professor.
Rural people hate city people? Really? I was under the impression that the vast majority of 'rural' people occasionally look on in bemusement, but for the most part simply don't spend much time at all thinking about 'city' people, especially in that context. Perhaps I need to get out and take a look at the big bad world.
There is some upside, his viewpoint may have become more reality-based in the last couple of years.
Jane,
I live in very urban Houston Texas. Work has me traveling to and working in urban areas worldwide. On the other hand I grew up on a working cattle ranch in a fairly isolated, rural area.
Speaking only for myself I don't hate urban people I hate the stupid %^!*#$ policies the urban people keep enacting to try and "help" the rural people out:-)
One example is ethanol from corn (currently making pork and chicken production a money loser and well on the way to having a big negative financial impact on cattle raising).
Another fun examples is the Conservation reserve program which has inflated land prices, given lucrative financial rewards to those who farmed in an environmentally destructive manner, and made it very difficult for new farmers to get a start.
Unfortunately rural America has provided many good example of the law of unintended consequences for a very long time.
The social skill sets required to operate in rural and urban environments or more similar then you would think. Common courtesy works wonders in both environments.
Cheers,
TJIT
"a mixture of hostility to intellectuals, Hollywood, journalists, (etc)"....I've always thought it kind of odd to see "intellectuals" and "Hollywood" on the same side of so many things, given the complete lack of intellectual knowledge/interests on the part of many Hollywood types.
Logic? What fucking logic?
Where do people come up with this shit.
Most of my New York friends find nothing odd or prejudiced about hating people in the south because they disagree with their way of life, and resent the need to compromise with them politically.
Jane, that sentence cries out for a post of its own. What do they hate?
What's amazing to me is how people from the Upper West Side/Dalton/Harvard axis are completely unable to grasp the taste/value dichotomy. (So that, for Yglesias, living in cities isn't a Jewish custom, or even a Jewish taste, it's a Jewish VALUE.) Shining through every word Yglesias writes is the belief that his cultural predilections aren't different, they're BETTER, and he's better. And he has a Harvard degree to prove it.
I agree with other commenters that the most notable and revealing bit in the Yglesias excerpt it that crack about Christians wanting to hasten the end of the world. Yglesias is in a very dark place if he actually regards so many of his fellow citizens as an implacably evil ‘other’ bent on world destruction.
This reminds me of when Bill Moyers made a fool of himself a couple years ago. He wrote this breathless article about Republicans yearing for the rapture and so on, but for a concrete example he had to dig all the way back to the Reagan administration for a quote from James Watt about how natural conservation is unimportant in the light of the imminent second coming. But it turns out the quote was an urban legend, created and repeatedly echoed by the religious/conservative/Republican-hating echo chamber. (For more amusement, see this sanitized version of Moyers’ article.)
Some facts are just too good to check. There’s also that recurring April fool’s prank about how southern state legislators passed a law declaring that pi is equal to three, and the recent report that national park rangers are forbidden to discuss the geological age of the Grand Canyon. (Garry Trudeau stepped up to be the fool that time.)
I’m just an atheist in a college-town, so maybe I don’t know about such widespread depravation. But it seems to me that extraordinary claims about the motives of so many people should be greeted with a bit of, you know, rational skepticism.
Most of my New York friends find nothing odd or prejudiced about hating people in the south because they disagree with their way of life, and resent the need to compromise with them politically.
Jane, that sentence cries out for a post of its own. What do they hate?
Posted by bgates at January 31, 2007 11:36PM
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Yeah Jane,
I second bgates suggestion. Curious minds want to know.
I've decided that Yglesias reminds me of an 18 year-old Linus van Pelt.
"Valorize"? Must be a Harvard word.
Intellectuals?
As in "I have a degree from X University, so you should listen to my opinion on things I know nothing about?" Expertise in any subject is not the same as expertise in every subject.
Those who can and do have a rather healthy skepticism toward those who can't but try to tell others how it should be done. Rather than intellectual, perhaps the proper term is ineffectual.
First I should start this off with the caveat that I am Captain Oblivious, so take this with the appropriate grain of salt, but...
I grew up in St Louis. It wasn't until I was in my 30s that I realized that people have a real prejudice against Jews. I honestly don't know anyone in my world view who cares one way or the other about the Jews as a classification. For the most part, they're just another group of people. Most of the people I know who have opinions about Israel seem to have based them on the current political situation. So...
Based on that, I'd have to Mr Yglesias might want to spend some time with those people whose motives he claims to understand. We made fun of California and New Yorkers because they were way more liberal than we were, not because of their religious make up. And I'm assuming Mr Yglesias probably would have lumped StL under "farm folk", just because it's in fly over country. :)
I think "hate" is awfully strong for what New Yorkers (I am one, though a bit of a petunia in an onion patch) feel. Probably the disdain between, say, rural Southerners and New Yorkers is about equal, and so is the unhappiness about having to share a country. Where there is a difference is that living in the country enforces a certain tolerance, because people are spread out in their own houses and farms and it's truly impossible to police their behavior. Plus, everyone is culturally homogenous (how much diversity can there be in such a sparse population?), so there isn't much to fight about. These circumstances foster a live-and-let-live attitude.
In contrast, in the city, your neighbors are right on top of you, and the behaviors you disapprove of are in your face. So if your neighbors are smoking, or wearing pastels, or cooking with shortening, or reading the Bible, or a hundred other things of which Matt Yglesias's friends would disapprove, you can't ignore it. Plus they don't go to the same church or school, so you can't talk to them. Thus New Yorkers develop the habit of legislating other people's behavior.
What an offensive little chap Mr Yglesias must be. The benefits of a liberal education would seem to be lost on him.
Why have the neologisms "Christophopia" or "Ruralophobia (farmophopia?)" not been coined?
I've decided that Yglesias reminds me of an 18 year-old Linus van Pelt.
Other than the perpetual thumb-sucking, I don’t see the resemblance.
Why have the neologisms "Christophopia" or "Ruralophobia (farmophopia?)" not been coined?
Because most people are secure enough in their own lives that they don’t need to overcompensate by labeling people who disagree with or disapprove of them as having some sort of “phobia.”
"Phobia" and "phobic" are two of the most used and most mis-used words in the language. How many people actually have an "unreasonable fear" or an "irrational fear" of, for example, homosexuals, christians, jews, southerners, urban dwellers, or any other category or grouping of people you wish to chose? A dislike is not a phobia. A concern is not a phobia.
I am beginning to think I am developing phobia-phobia, but I'm not yet phobic about it.
Most of my New York friends find nothing odd or prejudiced about hating people in the south because they disagree with their way of life, and resent the need to compromise with them politically.
I live in NYC and I would say that is an overstatement. "Hate" is too strong a word. But given the vast cultural difference between say, rural Alabama and NYC, some resentment is understandable. Also, I don't think the negative feelings are personal also the fundamental attribution error does come into play.
Y81,
Where there is a difference is that living in the country enforces a certain tolerance, because people are spread out in their own houses and farms and it's truly impossible to police their behavior. Plus, everyone is culturally homogenous (how much diversity can there be in such a sparse population?), so there isn't much to fight about. These circumstances foster a live-and-let-live attitude.
Are you saying people in the South have a live and let live attitude? Are we talking about American South? I'm confused.
The idea that the American right (unlike, say, the European right) is hostile to Jews is wierdly disconnected from reality - it strikes me as an antiquated idea. Anyone with any experience of the provincial, militaristic American right knows that it's not generally anti-Semitic. The default attitude I noticed in the south of my youth (Virginia, and a long string of Army towns) tended to view Christianity as realized Judaism, and both Protestants and Catholics would probably have agreed with the late Pope's view that God's promise to the Jews was enduring - not that their conversion would bring on the Rapture; even in the South that's viewed as a fringeward attitude. There are strong Jewish communities all over the South, and it's sort of hard to believe that they would have stayed there if they disagreed strongly with the values Yglesias claims they don't share with their neighbors. But they are long established - long enough that Jews made up a numerically significant component of the Army of Northern Virginia, which would seem to merit participation in the mainstream of Southern culture, if anything does.
Yglesias' view strikes me as suspect, on grounds of urban, upper-middle-class bicoastal provincialism. He may believe the right thinks these things (and I'm sure education, conversations with friends, etc have reinforced this belief), but I doubt that he knows it. What he does know are his own attitudes, and he's suggesting that they enjoy a greater currency than they actually do.
MS: Yes, I think people in rural America (South and elsewhere) are more tolerant than people in New York City, in the sense of not wanting to use the power of the state to suppress behaviors of which they disapprove. For instance, both conservative Southern Baptists (historically) and liberal secular New Yorkers (more recently) disapprove of smoking, but only one of those groups passes laws against it.
Ed Reid: Accurate but not explanatory. The other -phobia terms were not coined etymologicaly but politically, to too good an effect.
Thorley Winston: You may be right. The more secure in your own culture you are, the less you may feel the need to demonize others. This may put you at a cultural/political disadvantage?
I'm still surprised that the effort to tar the phobia-hurlers with their own brush has not been made. It is not like all the Christians and extremely rural folk appear to be entirely self-secure.
Are you saying people in the South have a live and let live attitude? Are we talking about American South? I'm confused.
The American South attitude I would describe as follows:
1) Do want you want behind closed doors, but be normal and inoffensive in public;
2) In fact, be more than inoffensive, be extremely polite in public;
3) This politeness extends to elaborate social rituals (such as the "offering to pay in a situation where everyone knows it won't be accepted, because it's the other person's duty to pay for some reason" ritual);
4) If you fail at being polite or misread various social rituals, be prepared to make enemies who won't tell you what you did wrong, remaining polite, until the moment when you go too far and they explode.
Sort of like Japan, actually.
The American West has more the "live and let live."
My mother's company (based in TX) was bought by a company based in NY. From then on, she was intimately involved in the transition of power, systems, etc... to the new company. She was constantly amused by the fact that the New Yorkers seemed to think that everyone did things the way they do in New York. She was constantly having to explain the differences between Houston and New York.
I guess the rest of the country has an advantage since we are constantly exposed to New York culture on television shows while New Yorkers are reinforced in their belief that the whole world is like New York by those same television shows.
Matthew's writing is kind of difficult to follow... or maybe it's his thoughts. It could be the way that he wields a hugely broad brush and says a lot of things that basically aren't true to support his confusion about something that he admits isn't true.
I think Yglesias' anti-Christian bias is covered thoroughly enough above.
I can add in that from the many years I have lived in the South, most of the resentment was in terms of taxes and a sense of government interference in one's daily life. There's a perception among many people there that they are paying all of their lives for programs that they will never use and there is a strong resentment because of this.
Y81 you folks still have quite a few blue laws on the books no?
You're not really making your case.
Y81,
I don't see what is so tolerant about trying to amend the constitution that would prevent consenting adults from getting married. And in NY, we may ban smoking in restaurants, but at least we can rent Harry Potter books from our libraries.
You can't carry guns to defend your life. And some of you folks (those in Chicago and DC) can't even keep them at home. A much bigger infringement than the (way overblown) library incident.
I think I am in a reasonable position to comment intelligently on Matthew's post.
- I was born, raised and went to college in Boston
- Lived in LA for 2 years
- Went to grad school and worked in NY for 3 years
- Married a jewish woman
- Am currently living in Oklahoma
And I gotta say that the people out here are a lot more tolerant, nicer and much saner than the people in NYC.
In New York, if you mention a mildly conservative viewpoint. Like for example opposition to Rent Control, Minimuim Wage or Gun Control, people immediately assume that your IQ must be under 100 or you are just a bad person. There is no tolerance for ideas out of a certain intellectual spectrum.
Here in the mid-west, people frankly stay out of your way. If you don't want to get in to arguments about politics, just don't bring it up in dinner conversation. In New York people would constantly bring up to me how stupid GWB is, or how the US government is run by oil interests.
Sometimes when I read a piece by Yglesias, I start hearing voices. Well, ok, not voices in the sense of tinfoil-hat-dom, but rather one particular voice. The voice of Woody Allen's character in "Annie Hall", that whining, querelous, grossly-incompetent-outside-of-one-tiny-area-of-life voice. This is definitely one of those times...
"Did you hear what he said? He said Jew eat yet! Did you hear that?"
lannychiu,
That is very similar to my experience in Georgia. I think people in the Northeast have convinced themselves of a certain moral or intellectual superiority and reinforce it all the time.
On a more serious note, this idea that all evangelical Christians, or all conservative Christians, or all Protestants except for the mainstream denominations, etc. are eagerly supporting the nation of Israel solely so that all the Jews can be killed or converted at the end of the world is beginning to border on "blood libel". It is not quite to the stage of the "Protocols", but it is getting there.
One of the hallmarks of a genuine intellectual is the ability to recognize and dismiss such garbage. That Yglesias seems to have some difficulty in differentiating between fact and the opinions he & his echo-chamber hold, means that regardless of what pieces of paper are on his wall, he is not an intellectual.
bob: You aren't paying attention (a common failing of those who know everything already). I live in New York City. I didn't go to Dalton, because it's too artsy; I went to Collegiate. I have lived in New York all my life except for my years, between the ages of 18 and 25, in New Haven and Berkeley. I'm not a rural Southerner or Westerner.
MS: I have defined the sense in which I am using the word "tolerance"--i.e., not using the coercive power of the state to prevent behavior of which you disapprove. This has nothing to do with gay marriage, which would involve, for its supporters, changing the law to valorize behavior of which they do approve, and, for its opponents, retaining current law in order to avoid valorizing behavior of which they don't. Many people outside big Northeastern cities are willing to tolerate ambiguity and diversity; it is only in places in New York that an attitude like yours, which says that all behavior must be either curtailed or affirmatively supported by the state, prevails.
Nothing stops "consenting adults" from getting "married." Heck, my mother once officiated at a lesbian wedding, and she's not even a minister!
And as it turns out, none of those horrible redneck southern types (Or, to use the Seattle bogeyman, people from east of the Cascades) tried to prevent it from happening, nor did they pass a law forbidding it.
As for whether the law of intestate succession should be altered, well, that's a different matter.
Living in (relatively rural) laPorte, IN. and traveling to work in Chicago, at least in conversations I've had, there is a City-Rural no likee thing going on. The country folk only like it when the City folk come to shop (then leave) and take their attitudes with them. The city folk make fun of the country folk for being yokels. I'm the enemy where I work because I like to shoot. And can change the brake lines on my truck. Evidently that makes me a hillbilly or redneck. Whatever. (Red Neck, White Sox and Blue Ribbon Beer....) The city folk don't like to get their hands dirty.... There are always exceptions too.
I wonder if Yglesias actually believes his own stupid sh*t?
I wonder if Yglesias actually believes his own stupid sh*t?
I'm no expert on the guy, but he seems to take everything he says very, very seriously....like a 14 year old writing poetry about alienation/love/death level of "seriously".
I'm no expert on the guy, but he seems to take everything he says very, very seriously....like a 14 year old writing poetry about alienation/love/death level of "seriously".
ROTFLMAO!
Richard Cook:
Is LaPorte IN still relatively rural? Relative to chicago, I guess so. I've expected suburban encroachment to overwhelm the area ever since the old family farm sold off the outlots. Haven't been back to check, though.
What prompted a reply to a post made nearly two years ago?
In contrast, in the city, your neighbors are right on top of you, and the behaviors you disapprove of are in your face. So if your neighbors are smoking, or wearing pastels, or cooking with shortening, or reading the Bible, or a hundred other things of which Matt Yglesias's friends would disapprove, you can't ignore it.
I disagree with this entirely.
In a city one is much freer to be an individual, even if that individualism borders on the anti-social. And that's because you can get lost amidst the millions who live around you. There's far more anonymity in the city, in other words. This is in great contrast to rural areas, where it's much more likely that someone recognizes you when you walk down the street. The power of social disapprobation is far stronger in rural areas and in small towns, where everybody knows who you are. Both liberals and conservatives in this society feel the need to legislate for or against this or that sort of behavior. These desires are rooted deep in political philosophy and economics, and have little to do with the rural/urban dichotomy.
Great post, Jane. Spot on. I think y81 also pretty much captures the Yglesias issue. There's a certain urban ethos (by no means strictly Jewish) that basically amounts to a presumption of superiority. If anything, it's more embarassing than anything. That he would say some of those things with a straight face makes him look as ignorant and insular as the stereotype he's trying to portray. Don't worry, Matthew, we all accept your urbane credentials.
I've never lived in NYC, but when I'm walking around there's a good chance that I'll run into someone I know. More so than here in the suburbs of michigan, where I grew up.
Rob Lyman, you've said something that stunned me! There are *people* living east of the Cascades? But it's DESERT out there! And there are COUGARS, and unabashed Cougars at that!
If ever I find myself on the eastbound lane of I-90, be assured that I'll be closing my eyes and flooring it until I hit Boise or Bozeman or anything after.
Actually, Washington state is a great example of this urban-vs-rural problem; Western Washington has the very great majority of the population, but about a third of the land area (that's a guess off the top of my head, frankly) as Eastern Washington, and while there's a little bit of farming going on west of the mountains, there's not a whole lot of city going on to the east.
Where did Matthew Yglesias get the idea that parts of the left don't hate big cities? Wouldn't New York starve if the Green slogan "Eat your view" were taken seriously?
Like many on that side of things Mr. Y has no problem writing about things he knows nothing about.
While we're generalizing, here's a neutral comment: Southerners are unlike people from any other region in this country in their strong concern with what people elsewhere think about them, and in their pre-emptive response of holding up their supposed critics to a harsh light. "Northerners haaaaaaaaaate us, it's not fair, let's talk about how nasty northerners are, but don't forget they started it."
I don't blame them; no region of the country has had anything like the experience the South has had, and it's no surprise it emerged from the past 300 years with a sense of insecurity and resentment at being examined and monitored by do-gooders from elsewhere and struggling to get out of poverty.
So, when was the last time you heard someone from the Midwest or California start talking up how mean people from the rest of the country were for disliking them, and then joining in an on-line group therapy discussion about how they're really the nicest people in the country, the most libertarian/progressive/conservative (take your pick, people redesign their homes in their own images, as this thread shows), and how everyone else is wrong and hypocritical to hate them? It's ludicrous. Few people think that way, even though Californians are pretty widely resented in the West because of their wider demographic impact. Midwesterners are the nicest people in the country, but unlike others, they don't feel compelled to tell everyone about it and point out how different they are. They just do it.
Contrary to the "grain of Galt" in this post, few New Yorkers spare a thought for the South except when it shows up on their tv screens, bashing New Yorkers on C-SPAN, which isn't really that often. After all, the stereotype about New Yorkers is that they're self-absorbed and don't even realize there's a rest of the country out there; that hardly squares with the idea that they actively hate a part of the country they never visit or think about except when planning a golf trip.
Meanwhile, my governor has been barnstorming South Carolina telling jokes about the stupid liberals in Massachusetts, and getting huge applause for it. Spend a few minutes on a FR thread about Rudy Giuliani and see how friendly and patriotic southern conservatives can be about New York City. So if northerners do put down the Arts & Leisure section for a moment and notice all these awful things being said about us for votes, don't be surprised if we end up taking a second look at these people who are saying them, and trying to figure out why they're so obsessed. Just sayin'.
P.S. No one has ever asked me what church I belong to up here in the north. That's a nice bit of privacy.
Washington state is a great example of this urban-vs-rural problem;
It's also a pretty good example of the solution: ignore each other and leave each other alone. Seattlites get their gay domestic partner insurance benefits, and Grant County gets its guns. I've never met anyone who cares about the "Cascade curtain" other than lefty Seattle newspaper columnists.
This sentence struck me as a little odd: "The Irish aren't quite as city-loving, movie-making, academia-dominating a group as the Jews, but we're close." Maybe there are a lot of Irish in the cities and academia, but it sure isn't all of them. I grew up in a small town that had a considerable Irish contingent. In particular, the McManus family was huge, most of them were cherry farmers, and one (Pat McManus) is a well known humor columnist in hunting and fishing circles.
Brittain33,
I have lived in the south for many years, when I wasn't either living in England or Scotland. I must say that I don't recognize this place or people that you describe.
Sure there are some, look long enough and you will find examples to sustain every prejudice that you have ever held.
Most of the southerners I know, if they give any thought about northerners at all, the response is likely to be a bemused smile and a shake of the head indicating "what poor deluded fools they are, they haven't any common sense at all"
As to a conservative politician appealing to his constituency by making light of the foibles of liberals, what is he supposed to do, make fun of liberals from Montana or the Dakotas?
Also, someone asking you what church you go to, what has that to do with anything? Have you never taken a Dale Carnegie course? It's a conversation starter, nothing more.
B33,
Regarding your governor, assuming it's Mitt Romney. Right now he may be trashing the northeast, but as governor he's made a habit out of trashing my home town of Houston and expressed as a worst-case scenario that Boston might become more like Houston. That would, of course, be the equivalent of hell on earth. Except to Houstonians who, for the most part, enjoy living there.
Sure there are some, look long enough and you will find examples to sustain every prejudice that you have ever held.
I think that is very true and applies to any region or culture in the country.
"I'm equally unimpressed with the Christian Zionist view that Israel must be supported in order to encourage all Jews everywhere to move there in order to hasten the end of the world as we know it."
Matthew Yglesias is yet another example of the excessive hype of an Ivy League education. He graduated from Harvard and in short order has become a pretty big celebrity in the blogosphere, but yet nothing he writes is worthwhile, or in this case even factually accurate.
When I started hearing and reading similar comments in 2001 I did a little of my own research because I was honestly curious. I even went so far as to read the first three _Left Behind_ books and watch the movies starring Kirk Cameron. I had long coversations with friends and coworkers about their evangelical beliefs about the End Times, and spent hours reading and listening to sermons on the internet. Between all that and my pre-existing knowledge of the importance of predestination in Protestant theology, I know that Matthew Yglesias is talking out of his ass.
It's an expensive irony that as a third-tier public university student I have higher standards for my private thoughts than Harvard-grad Matthew Yglasias has for his public writings.
As they say, Christina, you can always tell a Harvard man, but you can't tell him much.
Matthew Yglesias is yet another example of the excessive hype of an Ivy League education. He graduated from Harvard and in short order has become a pretty big celebrity in the blogosphere, but yet nothing he writes is worthwhile, or in this case even factually accurate.
I wonder if Matthew Yglesias has ever considered that the reason why the American right has a “hostility to intellectuals . . journalists, academics” is because since he’s begun blogging and we’ve had a chance to read his thoughts, we really how utterly shallow and silly they are.
Seriously how often has Jane (a journalist with an Ivy League education) posted something from Mark Kleiman, Matthew Yglesias, Brad DeLonge, or Crooked Timber in which they make an utterly dishonest or factually incorrect argument and fall back on “I’m sorry you’re too stupid to understand what I really meant to say” rather than owe up to it and improve like Eugene Volokh, Arnold Klingman, or other bloggers?
It isn’t that we’re “hostile” to them merely because they’re “(self-proclaimed)intellectuals . . journalists, academics” but rather we don’t afford them any special respect because of their status and because the blogosphere enables to see how they make an argument that we realize they don’t deserve any.
Matthew Yglesias probably thinks you cannot be an intellectual without supporting a big intrusive state and an end to politically un-mediated civil society.
And as an earlier commenter pointed out, the idea of placing the words intellectual and Hollywood close to each other is thigh slapping funny.
I remember him making a complete ass of himself regarding the Balkans some years ago, so I am not exactly a member of his fan club as he does opine on subjects he knows jack shit about.
"I, at least, find [the right] remarkably uncongenial to the values of American Jewry [as I define them]."
Is this his attempt to make up for (possibly unconsciously) supporting anti-semitism last week? Does he think standing up for "Jewry" in other contexts will overtake the unsavory feel remaining from his last comment on New York Money Jews?
It's a pretty remarkable idea. Not only does he presume to speak for American Jewry (which just happens to stand for his personal beliefs), but apparently everyone is expected to support these beliefs on pain of some vague charge intended to bring anti-semitism to mind. Whatever happenned to tolerance? Now not supporting the same values is "uncongenial"? Any particular reason the right won't turn this around and conclude that "American Jewry" is "uncongenial". In his mind I mean, very few on the right are diseased enough to think this way. But in Yglesias' case it is certainly truer than the reverse.
It has obviously never ocurred to him that there is a difference between "accept everyone" and "not adopting someone else's culture is racist/sexist/homophobic". Anyone who can't see the gulf between these positions doesn't have sufficient grounding in reality to comment on anything.
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