[lbo-talk] authentically working class

Andy F andy274 at gmail.com
Fri Sep 12 04:28:08 PDT 2008


On Thu, Sep 11, 2008 at 9:24 PM, Bill Bartlett <billbartlett at aapt.net.au> wrote:


>> 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.

Uh, no, nobody begrudges you the milk and eggs. Except maybe certain milk and egg sellers. Maybe somebody thinks they aren't safe, and somebody else uses that as an excuse, but that's a different problem.

You don't have this narrative? I kind of thought you did, but maybe that's a US national projection. The one where real, authentic Australians herd sheep and cattle and don't live in Sydney? Here the tourist office story gets used to sell to the locals, not just the foreign tourists.

-- Andy



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