WS:
> Small business is the central and much revered icon of American
> popular mythology - another one is the military. I see it as a
> mixture of populist anti-intellectualism and xenophobia.
Doug:
>And self-reliance. Emerson still lives.
Gulick:
Right, and let's not overlook the fact that today's small business worship and other forms of petty bourgeois populism can trace their roots (at least in part) to the "hard work + thrift = Godliness" memes, motifs, and themes prevalent in the various anti-Church of England Protestant sects. It's easy to forget this in a deracinated, commercial media-saturated age, when in the popular mind "WASPS" are loosely associated with today's Northeastern Corridor/Left Coast upper class secular liberalism (of the cultural if not political sort), not the bible thumping of the Midwestern and Southern commonfolk.
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