<!doctype html public "-//W3C//DTD W3 HTML//EN"> <html><head><style type="text/css"></style><title>The vulgar poor - was The Texas populist take on the t</title></head><body> <div>Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:</div> <div><br></div> <blockquote type="cite" cite>That may be true, but the "investor class" does not put the obnoxious<br> "God Bless Amercia" stickers on their trucks, attend "Bomb Saddam<br> Parties" in sports bars (http://www.thunderdomeonline.com), watch Club<br> 700, curse Fonda Jane, faggots, and feminazis, or beat up war<br> protesters.  It is the two-bit 401k and Social Security pricks who do.<br> So far in my life, I received numerous threats from the latter, but<br> nobody from the "investor class" did anything wrong to me. Why should I<br> care about them getting a free ride?  That they "corrupt democracy in<br> America?"  There is not much to corrupt to being with - the system is</blockquote> <blockquote type="cite" cite>alredy rotten to its core. </blockquote> <div><br></div> <div>Well put, Orwell had something to say about this sort of attitude in  "Down and Out in Paris and London" back in 1933:</div> <blockquote><br></blockquote> <blockquote>This is particularly the attitude of intelligent, cultivated people; one can read the substance of it in a hundred essays.  Very few cultivated people have less than (say) four hundred pounds a year, and naturally they side with the rich, because they imagine that any liberty conceded to the poor is a threat to their own liberty.  Foreseeing some dismal Marxian Utopia as the alternative, the educated man prefers to keep things as they are.  Possibly he does not like his fellow-rich very much, but he supposes that even the vulgarest of them are less inimical to his pleasures, more his kind of people, than the poor, and that he had better stand by them.  It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob that makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions.</blockquote> <blockquote><br></blockquote> <blockquote>Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear.  It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like Negroes and white men.  But in reality there is no such difference.  The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.  Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?  Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well.  But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor.  For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty?  In my copy of Villon's poems the editor has actually thought it necessary to explain the line "Ne pain ne voyent qu'aux fenestres" by a footnote:  so remote is even hunger from the educated man's experience.  From this ignorance a superstitious fear of the mob results quite naturally.  The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day's liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory.  'Anything', he thinks, 'any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose'.  He does not see that since there is no difference between the mass of rich and poor, there is no question of setting the mob loose.  The mob is in fact loose now, and - in the shape of rich men - is using its power to set up enormous treadmills of boredom, such as 'smart' hotels.</blockquote> <blockquote><br></blockquote> </body> </html>