The United States of Arugula
In today’s column, David Brooks observes that “over the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts.” He diagnosis the problem as stemming from the fact that “Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare . . . [w]hat had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole.” I said something similar recently, arguing that the conservative movement “still draws the same lines” as when it was more politically successful, but now “draws the ‘real America’ circle more narrowly — defines it as a kind of self-conscious hickdom that construes Cafferty as a citified elite.” Since I wrote that, I believed it. But I’m less sure now than I was a week ago.
The reason is that I’ve been reading David Kamp’s book, The United States of Arugula: The Sun Dried, Cold Pressed, Dark Roasted, Extra Virgin Story of the American Food Revolution. This was written long before Barack Obama’s arugula gaffe and it’s not at all about politics. But of course everything is politically relevant if you’re politically inclined. And the political takeaway of Kamp’s book is that a lot of the causation goes in the other direction. In 1968 or even as late as 1980, it was genuinely the case that things like fancy salad greens or shallots were only known to a small, self-conscious avant-garde. In the intervening decades, we’ve seen the rise of a mass gourmet culture. Mesclun mix may not be the food of choice for the typical person, but it’s still very much a mass market product widely available at your typical supermarket, not some incredible rarity.
That suggests, to me at least, that it’s not so much the case that the GOP has traded in a strategy of narrowly targeted rhetorical attacks on liberal intellectuals for broader attacks. Rather, it’s the case that similar rhetorical strategies have come to target more-and-more people as certain once countercultural habits become widespread yuppie habits. Indeed, now that I think about it this is sort of what Bobos in Paradise is about.
57 Responses to “The United States of Arugula”
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October 10th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
That analysis doesn’t really make sense. Attacking liberal elites for drinking lattes or eating arugala wouldn’t have any traction until the practices had become widespread enough to make it understandable to the target audience.
October 10th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
it’s the case that similar rhetorical strategies have come to target more-and-more people as certain once countercultural habits become widespread yuppie habits.
I think the main countercultural habit that has become widespread lately is “being short of money and seeing very little hope for the future.”
October 10th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
Dude, I think the word gaffe is an overstatement unless you add a qualifier such as “manufactured” in front of it.
October 10th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
Thanks for the picture. I wasn’t sure what arugula was. I now know that it’s one of those unknown leafy green things that keep showing up in my salad. I guess I’ve been eating for years. It’s weird, though, I don’t feel any more elitist or subversive. Maybe that’s because I’m a Muslim and don’t know it yet.
October 10th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
Was it a gaffe or a “gaffe”?
October 10th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
Well, yeah. More people live in cities and suburbs than did 30 years ago. More people have college and post-graduate degrees. More people like fancy coffee and gourmet food and aspire to a “first class” lifestyle. By the same token, fewer people live in rural areas and fewer people hunt.
None of this is surprising, except perhaps to the likes of Republican strategists. And, actually, even they probably realize that the trend is moving against the sort of rural-Kansas-is-real-America/East-Coast-cities-are-full-of-commies rhetoric they continue to employ. I believe that what the count on is the same sort of psychological response that they get from atheists and the non-religious when they continually praise god and church and “faith”.
The non-religious are conditioned to almost feel guilty of their own beliefs and to reflexively acknowledge that religious belief is praiseworthy while non-belief is not. Thus, you loose nothing, politically, by praising belief and being against non-belief. Similarly, the urban, college-educated arugula eaters reflexively acknowledge that the rural Kansas hunter with a red, white, and blue baseball cap is more “authentic” than they are.
What’s changing is that as we urban, college-educate arugula eaters become a large portion of the overall population, we are starting to get sick of this crap.
October 10th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
Dude, I think the word gaffe is an overstatement unless you add a qualifier such as “manufactured” in front of it.
yeah - this is like calling the original swiftboating: Kerry’s “getting shot in Vietnam” gaffe
October 10th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
It’s faux populism. Attacking the intellectual elite or the media elite serves to distract people from the economic elite that really run things. Apparently it doesn’t work during a global economic collapse.
October 10th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
Matt, we’ve been through this before. Everyone eats arugula, they just don’t know it. Some hicks call it “rocket” or “zip” or something. Yes, the Republican culture war has basically made it the hicks vs everyone. Isn’t that the end game of the “Southern strategy”?
October 10th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
It’s called “rocket” in England. If you get a ready-made sandwich at a Pret A Manger shop you will find it on half the sandwiches.
October 10th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
The rise of Starbucks is another example of this. Twenty years ago espresso drinks were the province of intellectuals on the coasts. They were associated with deserts at Italian restaurants, with beatniks in San Francisco and Seattle, with Greenwich Village in New York, and with effete intellectuals at Harvard. Today, every air traveller is greeted with an espresso stand at the airport, fast food chains like McDonalds serve espresso, working class stalwarts like Dunkin’ Donuts serve lattes.
October 10th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
Isn’t this the same or similar thing to what happened to the Democratic Party before the Dixiecrats left or were expelled? That is, since in the South, there has always been but one party there (whatever that party was nominally called), there is very little turnover. Thus, the party elders from the South, because they are unchallengeable in their home districts, stick around forever and eventually rise to high positions (especially in the US Senate). That is why FDR had to deal with very powerful, conservative Democratic Southern senators. FDR’s Northern Republican opponents could be opposed by Democratic challengers, but his Southern Democratic opponents couldn’t be (FDR paid them off with large amounts of cash and segregating the New Deal social spending programs, but even the master politician FDR couldn’t displace them).
Now, since the Dixiecrats have finally completed the long migration into the Republican party, the Republican party now exhibits those tendencies. As Allan Lichtman argues in White Protestant nation, the tendency has been always to explicitly limit “true Americans” to white Protestants. Reagan, being a masterful politician, was able to expand that to the Reagan Democrats but that expansion didn’t stick.
October 10th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
Thus, the party elders from the South, because they are unchallengeable in their home districts, stick around forever and eventually rise to high positions (especially in the US Senate)
It’s also because southern politicians tend to start their political careers at a younger age than others. This was a holdover from the plantation days where if you weren’t the oldest son who inherited the plantation, you went into the military or politics immediately.
As Allan Lichtman argues in White Protestant nation, the tendency has been always to explicitly limit “true Americans” to white Protestants. Reagan, being a masterful politician, was able to expand that to the Reagan Democrats but that expansion didn’t stick.
Are you sure about this? Do the Republicans really regard white working-class Catholics as not “true Americans”? If anything, I’d have assumed that Reagan managed to get them into the fray permanently– it’s just that their numbers have been dwindling and are thus less of an electoral advantage.
October 10th, 2008 at 2:45 pm
It was a self-conscious calculation that there would always be, in the Republican race-to-the-bottom, lots of people on the bottom. It makes sense in the way that there will always be half a population below the 50th percentile. You can win elections but you can’t govern effectively by limiting yourself to what dumbos can understand and approve of.
Hence the quagmire in Iraq and the smoking rubble of our pensions.
October 10th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
“That suggests, to me at least, that it’s not so much the case that the GOP has traded in a strategy of narrowly targeted rhetorical attacks on liberal intellectuals for broader attacks. Rather, it’s the case that similar rhetorical strategies have come to target more-and-more people as certain once countercultural habits become widespread yuppie habits.”
This is only partially true.
While it is correct that the ‘McGovern electorate’ is larger now than it was in 1972, it’s still not enough to win national elections. Let’s not forget that George Bush beat Gore and Kerry by simply out-Americaning them.
What’s happening in 2008 is that cultural concerns are being ignored due to the electorate having more pressing concerns.
In other words, we’re on holiday this cycle from Atwater-ism being a successful strategy, but holidays do come to an end at some point.
October 10th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
So here’s the real question: is parseling an elitist green? That stuff grew like a weed at my last house. My brother came to visit one time and made a salad out of it. I didn’t even know you could eat it at the time. But making a salad from the weeds in your lawn hardly seems elitist. But who knows what the Republicans will come with next? It kind of reminds me of Chairman Mao’s assertion that communist seeds could be planted closer together because they were more cooperative. Maybe it’s time we recognize that plants don’t actually hold political views. Crazy, I know.
October 10th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
Anybody else excitedly click on the book link after misreading the title of Bobos in Paradise?
October 10th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
McDonald’s actually has an ad about this– just caught the end of it this morning, but it was a very ’suburban mom’ sounding woman talking about the freedom to drive an SUV and wear acrylic and still get a decent cappucino. “Thanks, McDonald’s!”
October 10th, 2008 at 3:03 pm
that was very funny fostert.
October 10th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
Nate Silver on fivethirtyeight.com likes to talk about the Starbucks:Walmart ratio as being one of the key cultural indicators of red states or blue states. It’s amazingly consistent with current political conventional wisdom.
I have a feeling your argument is what underlies this. As hybrid cars become more widespread in the US, McDonalds starts marketing mixed green salads, and elitist cappuccinos and lattes spew out of Starbucks everywhere, more and more people start to see how silly and artificial the “otherness” rhetoric that republicans have previously used to divide “americans” against “liberal elitists” is.
October 10th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
Rather, it’s the case that similar rhetorical strategies have come to target more-and-more people as certain once countercultural habits become widespread yuppie habits. Indeed, now that I think about it this is sort of what Bobos in Paradise is about.
Whereas most of David Brooks’s subsequent work has been about creating exactly the sort of social and geographical polarization that he’s now crying about. I guess it’s only a problem when it’s cutting against him.
Actual line from yesterday’s column:
“Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.”
Gee, David, I wonder who pushed that argument?
October 10th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
Mesclun mix may not be the food of choice for the typical person
Last week the cafeteria downstairs in my building had a big bin of “Mescaline mix” on the salad bar.
I thought about buying them out and selling it on the street at $10 a baggie, but thought better of it.
October 10th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
Let’s not forget that George Bush beat Gore and Kerry by simply out-Americaning them.
Let’s not forget that George Bush won fewer votes than Gore and had a recount called off in Florida. So, in so much as “Americaning” includes a Supreme Court intervention, that might be true.
October 10th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
The GOP has drawn the definition of “real American” so narrowly, and so at odds with the real mainstream culture, that they had to go all the way to Wasila, Alaska to find a prototypical “real American”. Obviously, if your ideal base is Alaskans, this is not going to be a successful electoral strategy.
October 10th, 2008 at 3:09 pm
Umm, sure - and the left hasn’t been demonizing people in flyover country. Pot, meet kettle.
October 10th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
Umm, sure - and the left hasn’t been demonizing people in flyover country. Pot, meet kettle.
Like those hicks from Illinois.
October 10th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
Matt, I hear you, I honestly do, when you say “arugula gaffe”. You’re trying to say “before Obama said something which retarded morons will seize on as elitist because any action which justifies their insane fear of Islam, Teh Gay Agenda and Straights who support it, Fear of A Black Planet, will do.” but…
It wasn’t a gaffe. At least if you have a fully functioning human brain. At worst, it was a “offend the absolute fucking cretinous part of part of America” statement. And this is not a bad thing. Anyone for whom “Arugula” is code for “not like me and therefore not fit to govern” is not fit to vote. Fuck them very much.
I’m not American, but for me this is so interesting because, like most educated people the world over:
1) We want an American president who doesn’t make America look like a bunch of dumb sports jocks. Because, frankly, Bush does (while at the same time being the fakest jock EVAH)
2) We want to like you but sweet holy crap your foreign policy sucks like a hard working hooker.
So please stop spreading right-wing memes that don’t play outside of America-Wonderland and start speaking a little more truth to power. The choices are:
1. Idiot Lunatic Fuckard, vs
2. Someone who actually has a brain (this being after all the organ that seperates human from beast)
ETA: Sorry, slightly drunk. Read the whole post and realised its not you, but the cretins you’re ultimately replying to that need to hear this message, loud and clear.
October 10th, 2008 at 3:30 pm
the left hasn’t been demonizing people in flyover country.
Care to name them? Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, or Kerry? How about Obama? What about Pelosi or O’Neill? Please, name these politcians on “the left” that have been demonizing “flyover country” like the mold and filth like Bush and DeLay have engaged in. Please, Jimmy, tell us… if your statement is something other than a delusion that you wallow in, perhaps you’d like to share. Or you can stick to believing only what exists in your fevered imagination.
October 10th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
Well, my dear left, “arugula” is a code-word for those people who call us “hicks” and “sheeple”. Those people who think people who eat white bread are stupid and beneath them. Those people that point their finger at us and shame us. Those people who use their education to diminish us. Those people who don’t know the difference between knowledge and intelligence. Those people who don’t really help us, or know us, but they talk about what we should do, all the time. We spend most of our lives waiting on them, cleaning up after them, and fixing things for them, but they think we’re useless eaters because we don’t have class.
(Read Joe Bageant.)
The best way to get out of this game is to stop playing. If the left and progressives (whatever you want to call it) can’t get with the working class, then, in a country where the middle class is shrinking rapidly, and public education can be worse than none at all, we will find ourselves on the fringe for real, rather than it just appearing to be so in the corporate media.
October 10th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
So, Wiley, how do you “stop playing”? Does all that mean that we must renounce arugula in favor of white bread to preserve social solidarity with the working class?
October 10th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
Those people who think people who eat white bread are stupid and beneath them. Those people that point their finger at us and shame us. Those people who use their education to diminish us.
Wiley: who exactly are “those people” you’re referring to? Please cite one example of someone–anyone–saying, or even implying, that people who eat white bread are stupid.
October 10th, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Arugula is delicious and is very healthy. It’s also cheaper, per calorie, than other leafy greens, including lettuce, because it is so much more nutritious.
My grandfather, who spoke not a word of English and cut businessmen’s hair, shaved them with straight razors, and shined their shoes on the streets of Manhattan in the 60s and 70s to support three kids, grew arugula in the tiny communal yard of our Red Hook apartment, a 4th story walkup that shared a bathroom with 2 other familes. I find it endlessly hilarious that it has become the symbol of american elitism.
October 10th, 2008 at 4:28 pm
grew arugula in the tiny communal yard of our Red Hook apartment
And, as I’m sure you’re aware, these days moving to Red Hook is more of a signifier of elitism than eating arugula.
October 10th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
And, as I’m sure you’re aware, these days moving to Red Hook is more of a signifier of elitism than eating arugula.
amazing, isn’t it?
October 10th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
No, bgn. Renouncing arugula would be taking a code-word literally.
Gary, I’m a working class liberal. I hear these things all the time. You do too. Everyone here does.
I was warning my liberal friends to lighten up on the finger pointing, shaming, and over-identification with class issues such as diet, dress, habits of speech in the eighties…I’ve seen the left kill discourse just as surely as the right is now.
When people were ready to address their own racism, they could hardly open their mouths without being shamed into silence with “YOU’RE RACIST!!!” I’ve had a skin-head with his head in his hands sincerely asking himself why he was racist. Where did that start? “Was your family racist?” People aren’t going to examine their own bigotry, act against years of training, and challenge themselves if they don’t feel safe to do so. Or if they feel damned if they do, and damned if they don’t. Or if they feel like they’ve already been judged and found wanting—which many working poor already feel, because they have been judged less worthy all their lives. Many were treated like lost causes in school and they’re treated like shit at work.
It’s not symbols that need to be embraced—it’s people. Individuals. That’s what tolerance and liberalism is about, yes? No?
Of course there are right wing nuts that are so far gone that there is no use in trying, but they are outnumbered by people who really aren’t looking for a fight on a daily basis—people who have not had or seen the opportunities that a lot of educated and middle class people take for granted. When someone says “hick” or “sheeple” or even “stupid” they’re picking at a scab somewhere.
If you want people to join you, it’s best not to call them stupid sheeple. People who state flatly that the world would be better off if the human race would just die, are crazy if they really expect a critical mass of people to go along with that, too. Had to say that. It just floors me.
Not singing Kumbaya really, I just think it’s important to realize and remember that when someone uses any pejorative that is the equivalent of “arugula” and “elitist”, they’re playing the game—fueling the fire, keeping it going.
October 10th, 2008 at 4:39 pm
Blah @ #1:
“Attacking liberal elites for drinking lattes or eating arugala wouldn’t have any traction until the practices had become widespread enough to make it understandable to the target audience.”
There’s a sweet spot for populist resentment of trendy elite behavior. The demonized behavior in question must be common enough that the target audience has encountered it, at least on TV, but it must be sufficiently rare and expensive that your base hasn’t yet decided to embrace it.
Thus, the game has shifted over time. First, there were quiche-eaters. Then, middle America discovered that quiche is a delicious, fattening dish made of pie crust, egg, and cheese. So they moved on to mocking exotic ethnic foods, such as Thai. But after a few years you could get a decent Panang Curry in Louisville, so that was out. Then it was Latte-sippers, but now you can’t drive through Western Pennsylvania without spotting a Starbucks cup in a cop car.
Mocking “arugula” was of course a feeble effort to bring this bag of tricks into the 21st Century. But Matt’s right. They’ve really started shooting themselves in the foot. And I think the proof is starting to show in the county-level election returns. Rural America is a dwindling demographic, and many formerly conservative suburbs are becoming more urbanized and diverse and consequently trending Democratic. Even in places like suburban Indianapolis, which was once the most reliably Republican set of zip codes east of the Mississippi, there seems to be some rumblings of a tectonic shift away from the GOP.
October 10th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
“Are you sure about this? Do the Republicans really regard white working-class Catholics as not “true Americans”? If anything, I’d have assumed that Reagan managed to get them into the fray permanently– it’s just that their numbers have been dwindling and are thus less of an electoral advantage.”
Tyro rightly points to the weakest point in my argument. My defense would be that there seems to have been some weakening of even the Reagan Democrats generation themselves’ attachment to the Republican party (some of them have, of course, passed away). The children of the Reagan Democrats do not seem to be as closely attached to the Republicans - remember that Reagan won plenty of working-class areas in Massachusetts, New York, Illinois etc that are still quite white and working-class, but are now pretty much returning back to their roots in the Democratic party.
October 10th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
Don’t forget, “hillbillies, hicks, mouth-breathers, ignoramuses, retards, bottom-feeders, sheeple…”
Even when, in all fairness, the terms apply, do they really apply as broadly as they’re used?
In a society with a puritanical heritage, such as ours, it’s a shame to be poor. That shame is felt very deeply by people who work hard, play by the rules, and always get the short end of the stick. It’s very hard to overcome those feelings.
October 10th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
What the heck happened to discussing POLICY? On either side of the debate.
What are the pros and cons of raising taxes? Talking to Iran? Expanding/shrinking government’s role in the economy?
I proudly lean towards less government in all of these things and Obama can EARN my vote on this but why isn’t he or ANYONE talking about these things? Am I the only one who finds this odd?
October 10th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
Of course, the GOP pats the working poor on the back with their left hand, and reams them with their right.
We may go through a very tough reich, and learn the hard way what radical intolerance can do; but it seems like it shouldn’t be that hard to win the hearts of minds of the majority of Americans. They’ve been fed shit for a long time, so when they get really hungry for realism and pragmatism, it seems like it should not be too difficult to win people over to the challenge of building a sane and functional society.
October 10th, 2008 at 6:22 pm
Nope. In fact, Ike, I’ve been wondering where the term “platform” went?
October 10th, 2008 at 10:34 pm
They got stuck with a shrinking demographics whom, however, only they can really serve. It’s the same thing for GM, Ford, etc: only in the US could (at least once upon a time) you make money by selling cheap vehicles of enormous heft and with huge, gas guzzling engines. This was due both to low gas prices and to unique tastes among a certain demographic segment. While that segment has steadily contracted, it was still enormously attractive to domestic carmkers because no one could or would really serve it. It’s a trap, and couldn’t have snatched (in both cases) more deserving people.
October 10th, 2008 at 11:50 pm
I do enjoy reading Brooks. But part of me cringes when he continually over generalizes the trends of American life like an amateur sociologist.
I live in the very red city of Cincinnati. The city votes Republican year after year. It’s a socially conservative city. But it’s a corporate Republican city with tons of yuppies who are highly educated, shop at whole foods, and couldn’t care less about “class warfare”.
I think it’s a little off for Brooks to get caught up in the moment and generalize all Republicans as uneducated hicks who live in West Virginia.
October 11th, 2008 at 9:04 am
Well, you’re all a bunch of hicks - real elitists like myself refer to the plant by its Italian name rucola (or alternatively rugola). They also recognize that it’s not that much of a delicacy, but rather an overused and overpriced fad, just like Prosecco back in the day (or are people still drinking that stuff?).
October 11th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
Sure, Brooks did for once lambast his side, but he still is in utter denial.
1. Brooks regurgitates the usual RW “liberal academia won’t listen to conservatives and so they had to create a bizzaro world of ‘think tanks’ and magazines” tripe. Bobo, the reason conservatives can’t make it in academia is because their “ideas” do not hold up under scrutiny. Scratch the surface of any of the “big ideas” (trickle down, neo cons, infallibility of the market, etc.) and you have nothing. The right wing “intelligensia” responds to factual criticism with “liberals hate the military” or “liberals are unpatriotic” or “socialism!”. The right wing is impervious to empirical evidence, and that is why so few of them can be credentialed as professors.
2. Bobo is placing the blame on liberals, of course: quote “But over the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts. This expulsion has had many causes. But the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Michael Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads.”
Let’s dissect this “kept nominating costal pointy heads” crap:
1964 LBJ Texas - Goldwater Arizona
1968 HHH Minnesota - Nixon California
1972 McGovern S. Dakota - Nixon California
1976 Carter GA - Ford Mich
1980 Carter GA - Reagan California
1984 Mondale Missesota - Reagan California
1988 Dukakis Massachusetts - Bush (nominally Texas, born in Mass)
1992 Clinton Arkansas - Bush (ditto)
1996 Clinton Arkansas - Dole Kansas
2000 Gore Tennessee - Bush Texas
2004 Kerry Massachusetts - Bush Texas
Brooks would need year of deprogramming before entering civil society. He cannot help soiling himself with reflexive, stupid name calling, like Dukakis is a “pointy head”, or the Democratic delegates look like “a North Korean pep rally”. If there was a level playing field in the media, then Brooks would be a fourth string hack at a local television station. It is only because the conservative movement is devoid of content that he has a job at the Times.
October 11th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
As a gardener, I think folks might appreciate a note about Arugula the plant.
It is almost a weed. It grows in any scrap of dirt, reseeds itself from year to year, and produces from May to November without much attention, even without watering through all but the worst drought. You can add it to your iceberg lettuce salad for just a bit of zip, and to whatever you want (bacon, tomato & cheese sandwiches, yum!), for an hour or two effort a year.
It seems to me ridiculous that arugula has gotten this posh association.
October 11th, 2008 at 7:28 pm
re the “gaffe” issue. wasn’t he talking to a lettuce farmer when mentioning the price of Arugala?
in the context of growing higher profit crops? or was it even an arugala farmer?
this was one of the worst sham issues ever.
October 11th, 2008 at 9:17 pm
I’m sure that tonnes of people on the coasts feel themselves to be “better” than others, but this is nearly content-free, since I don’t think there’s an human group that _doesn’t_ think itself better than the others in some way, e.g. ‘we are the _real_ Americans’…particularism is universal. But in my better self:
I don’t think people who eat “Wonder”-style bread are stupid: I think that either they’re ignorant of how much better they could do by my lights, or that their lights are very different from mine.
Similarly, I don’t think I’m better than they are because I can understand more than one language; I believe that I’m better at languages, and I think my priorities are better than theirs—but I understand that they need not share my priorities(or my lights, or my liver for that matter) to be right, as I’m often wrong, and they are probably much better than I am at some things (investing, raising kids, driving)…and that none of that matters when we have interests in common and can productively work on them together.
And, finally, I must note that I’ve never, ever, heard anyone in New York, L.A., Berkeley, or Boston refer to the center of the country as “flyover country”. Never. Not once, and I’ve a nigh-phonographic memory for evocative turns-of-phrase. The only times I’ve ever heard or read the term used was in criticism for people using it whom I’ve never heard do.
October 12th, 2008 at 9:29 am
Everyone eats arugula, they just don’t know it. Some hicks call it “rocket” or “zip” or something.
Yeah, like those hicks in Paris and London.
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