Elites R Us

I'm proud to be in the pomposity club. How about you?

Would it be pompous of me to ask you to subscribe to my Newsletter?

You can of course correct me if I’m wrong, but if you’re reading this Newsletter, you are, along with your faithful scribe, smack dab in the red hot center of the elite.

What set me thinking about my pride of membership in the elite was a comment on my Facebook page, responding to my Salon column this morning, “Republicans are no longer a political party.  They’re a mob.”  The commenter was apparently unhappy with my conflating the mob that attacked the Capitol with the Republican Party. “My feeling is these people are just angry and frustrated,” he wrote.  “And when egged on by Trump [they] feel like a group with common hate of government ready to band together to destroy what appears to be the enemy - government.” 

Well, okay, he might even be right about some of the mob.  He goes on to wonder who they are:  Do they go to church?  Do they have families and friends?  Are they alienated from others?  Are they employed?  He suggests that until we “interview them in depth we will not know who they are and why they are doing what they are doing.”  When people are carrying clubs and mace and hockey sticks and stun guns and metal batons and lead pipes and using them to beat cops and break into the United States Capitol, I think it’s a little late in the game to be asking them who they are and why they’re pissed off.  Besides, in many cases, they told us who they were and why they had come to assault police officers and loot the Capitol when they took selfies and made videos of themselves as they went about their criminal tasks.

The comment then devolves into a rant that the real problem is that we haven’t taken the time to get to know the mob and understand their pain, and we haven’t accomplished this noble task because of who we are:  “The elites and people who are pundits from the NYT and other political venues are not who America is and most people realize they are in it for themselves and have no empathy for others. They talk to make money and upset more people than they satisfy.”

There is so much wrong with that sentence I hardly know where to begin, but let’s start with how  hackneyed and stupid it is.  You read or hear this kind of crap all the time from people on the right like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and who are fond of lumping their political enemies, “the libs” they work so hard to “own,” in with such coastal scum as “elites” and “pundits from the New York Times.” 

He’s right that there are “elites,” and “pundits,” and I’m proud to be among their number.  Practically everything about my life makes me an elite.  I was born into a family descended from Thomas Jefferson.  I graduated from West Point.  I’ve worked for newspapers and major magazines in New York City.  I lived and worked in Hollywood in the motion picture and television business.  And now I’ve gone and declared myself a pundit with my own, self-published Newsletter, and I did it pretty much because I felt like it and I could.

The rest of the crap he says is just that:  crap.  If he knew what you get paid to write an op-ed in  the New York Times or a column in Salon or a Newsletter on Substack for that matter, he would have one hell of a hard time making a case that we elites are in it for the money. If that were true, I’m in the wrong fucking business. 

Furthermore, I’m so tired of the trope about who or what “America is,” I’m about ready to puke up the sandwich I just ate from the One Stop Market here in Springs.

The notion that there is something inherently wrong with “elites” has wormed its way so completely into the national consciousness it is taken for granted even by us.  That this kind of mindless anti-intellectual blather found its way onto my Facebook page is evidence of how  completely it has been absorbed into our political and personal lives. 

Well, pay attention all you disgruntled whiners out there:  I am part of the “elite” and I’m proud of it.  I’ve spent more than 50 years working to get into the “elite.”   You don’t just get handed an assignment for a piece on the op-ed page of the Times because you’re standing there and you want it.  You earn being on that page, just like you earn having a novel published (I’ve published five), just like you earn having your articles appear in the pages of glossy hi-falutin’ national magazines, just like you earn the ability to write screenplays and have them produced by big-time studios out in Hollywood.

There has been an equal amount of griping and whining about Trump having his Twitter and Facebook accounts canceled.  It’s “censorship” or “cancel culture,” according to gasbags on the right like Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham.  They’re taking his free speech away, goes up the cry from the right.

Well, no they aren’t, any more than it’s censorship for a publishing house to decide not to publish a poorly written novel, or a Hollywood studio to refuse to make a movie based on a terrible script.  These kinds of decisions are made every day, and “censorship” does not come into it.  They aren’t “canceling” Trump’s rants on Twitter and Facebook.  They’re making a perfectly legal and understandable decision not to provide him a platform for him to instigate violence and whip up racism.  What are these right-wing assholes asking for anyway?  The “right” to have something published in the Times or posted on Twitter just because they say it should be?

The First Amendment simply does not confer that right.  All it confers is the right to speak without the government muzzling you.  If Trump or any of the rest of them want the right to write unfettered by constraints against inciting violence or lying about stolen elections or slandering innocent women who have been raped and abused, then they are free to go into the marketplace and try to find someplace else that will publish their nonsense.

The way things have stood for more than 240 years and still stand today is, “elites” get to make decisions about who and what they will publish or film or record and put up for sale.  If you don’t like the way the system works, go find another system.  And if you don’t like what “elites” like me write in their newsletters, go find another newsletter to read and leave me alone.  I’m too busy keeping my elite status in good standing to be bothered by people who think that it’s “time for a little less pomposity and elitism on the media.” 

Now watch me go back to what I’ve been happily doing for more than 50 years:  Serving up pomposity and elitism in massive quantities anytime I want.