[lbo-talk] authentically working class

Bill Bartlett billbartlett at aapt.net.au
Thu Sep 11 18:24:12 PDT 2008


At 12:52 PM -0400 11/9/08, Doug Henwood wrote:


>>And even if small-towners represented a larger portion of the
>>population, what of it? It wouldn't make abstinence eduction reduce
>>unwanted pregnancies, or make ID legit.
>
>No, it wouldn't. But it galls me no end that "small town America" is
>somehow seen as more real than big town America. Brooklyn, where I
>live now, is just one of five boroughs in NYC, but it's got more
>than three times the pop of Alaska. But Palin is "real" because
>she's from the sticks, and I'm not, because I'm a, as Rudy (of all
>people) put it with a sneer at the RNC, "cosmopolitan." My zip code
>alone, 11238, has five times the pop of whatever the fucking little
>burg is that Palin was mayor of. Which makes her real and me an
>astral projection, or French, or something.

Touchy! The things is, we won't begrudge you your urban delights, like museums and theatres and art galleries and public transport, if you stop begrudging us our simple bucolic pleasures. Like moose hunting (well, wallaby hunting in my case) and, and, let me see, there must be something else. Oh yeah, fresh unprocessed milk and eggs and so on.

But you do begrudge us those things. Untreated milk is proscribed as unfit for human consumption, because it has a couple of germs in it. Free-range eggs are defined out of existence. And moose hunting is condemned as barbaric.

Jeez, I can't even use snares and traps to catch rabbits anymore. Bloody know-nothings in the city insist on proscribing it. The latest thing is that the cockies are being pressured to stop mulesing their sheep, because millions of ignorant nongs who live in New York and Sydney and wouldn't know a ewe's twat from bale of hay, have got it into their heads that this is a cruel and barbaric practice. Millions of people who know nothing about hunting, who wouldn't even know how to pluck a chook, think they not only have the qualifications to comment on it, but to determine how and when it is ok.

You don't have any respect for us, you should not be surprised we don't have much respect for you. We are real, you are real.

Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas



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