On Fri, 26 Sep 2008 07:07:03 -0400, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> like they were interviewing a moron.
Maybe there are simply trying to appeal to the not to be underestimated moron vote who might vote for Palin a a symbolic act of revenge against every teacher and employer who embarrassed them in public. Plalin thus becomes more one of them than ever.
[WS:] It looks like a pseudo-Marxist smart alec populist spin aimed, well, at pissing off teachers and wealthy parents than explaining anything. I am not sure what your experience of the US is, but your postings suggest that you have no idea what this country and a substantial chunk of its population is like. Anti-intellectualism is a deeply ingrained tradition in the US culture - as aptly documented, inter alia, by Richard Hofstadter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hofstadter) and it is more an expression of rugged smart alec individualism and in-your-face philistinism than any act of "revenge," symbolic or otherwise. I personally met a number of people expressing such attitudes and I am pretty sure it is a part of an obnoxious mix of xenophobia, racism, and disdain for "liberal elites" than an act of retaliation for the "injuries of the class" - real or imagined. In fact these people typically feel morally superior to the groups
they disdain - so they simply bash them rather seek revenge for being "humiliated."
And one more thing - they typically side with the employers against "liberal elites," "unqualified teachers," "union lawyers," "tree huggers," and "n-word lovers" who "make it difficult" for American companies to do business in this country and are forced to "ship our jobs" overseas (this information is courtesy of my union lawyer friends who routinely encounter these attitudes in their work representing unions.) Wojtek
--------------------------------------------------------------- "When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost. [...] All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men." - HL Mencken ----------------------------------------------------------------