It's Not Their Place

Garry Trudeau reminds us all of the (in)famous article by The Village Queen Bee, Sally Quinn:

There's trashing and then there is trashing.

The Villagers were all afraid of the hicks from the hinterlands coming in and breaking the fine china:

Jackson was the first President to invite the public to attend the White House ball honoring his first inauguration. Many poor people came to the inaugural ball in their homemade clothes. The crowd became so large that Jackson's guards could not hold them out of the White House. The White House became so crowded with people that dishes and decorative pieces in the White House began to break. Some people stood on good chairs in muddied boots just to get a look at the President. The crowd had become so wild that the attendants poured punch in tubs and put it on the WhiteHouse lawn to lure people out of the White House. Jackson’s raucous populism earned him the nickname King Mob.

The Villagers looked at the selection of the chimperor as a reverse Jackson, installing the scion of a previous occupier from their own class to undo the "populist" damage of the Bubba from Arkansas. They cheered the coronation of C+ Augustus, who has most assiduously defended their class interests against the bottom 90% of the population. They eagerly joined Bush in trashing the economy, the nation's international integrity, the readiness of the military, the privacy of the population, the health of the environment. All that mattered to them, all that still matters to them, is putting the people they consider their social inferiors in their place.

The Village's selection of The Precious as their favored candidate should not be mistaken for any changing attitude towards the inferior and undeserving and most certainly not for approval of liberal democratic values. The praise for Obama is due to his embrace of High Broderism and his willingness to be a Very Serious Person on subjects like American military presence in the Middle East, Universal Health Care, privacy rights, regulation of corporations, and the social safety net generally.

Regard the media carefully. They did a lot of praising of Bush for his persona and folksy appeal while turning a blind eye to the rapacious assualt on the nation's wealth by the Movement Conservatives and being active cheerleaders for the Neocon assault on the rest of the world. Bush himself for most of it was treated as an affable, likeable onlooker to the bad things (assuming they were reported as bad or even at all) those other people (Cheney, Powell, Feith, Santorum, McConnell, Rumsfeld, Delay, et. al.) were doing.

Here is the narrative we will hear as regards The Precious - Oh, those bad, extremist, ideological Congressional Democrats, in the pocket of "special interests," refusing to support the oh-so-moderate and resonable requests of The Dear Leader. He's trying to be bi-partisan and they keep insisting on their populist agenda. They can't be doing this for rational reasons. [sotto voce It's because they are racists, you know.] If only they would see the need to impose austerity measures to restore confidence in the markets, and understand we need to stay in Afghanistan to confront terrorism, and quit trying to strangle business and innovation with those regulations.

The enemy will remain the lower classes, the people who trash things because they are trash, the Democrats will continue to be beaten up as the enemies of the state, and The Village's courtier culture will continue unabated, indeed, augmented by the willing cooperation of the Blogger Boyz.

Bob Somerby will remain very busy documenting the atrocities.

Anglachel