[lbo-talk] Blog Post. The Road Beckons: Excerpt from Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate

[michael yates]

Joanna asks me to elaborate on my take on a certain type of urban radical intellectual. In the book, I describe a dinner party in which we invited one of these to our apartment. It's a pretty funny story, but what irked me most was discovering that she and her husband had two rent controlled apartments, though they had plenty of money. This "me first" perspective I have found more common among a certain type ... since I wrote the book. And they had three cars! And once during a conversation at with a comrade at Monthly Review, he said, the context of where someone lived, he talked as if the fact that the person lived in Ohio meant that no attention had to be paid to him. Since the book, I have found that a certain type of urban ... dismisses most of the country, seemingly believing that millions of people who don't live in urban areas can be safely ignored. That they have little to tell us, that their lives don't matter. A kind of elitism I find repugnant.