Mark Steyn on the upcoming Bay State election
Bookworm on Jan 16 2010 at 9:13 am | Filed under: Elections
It’s vintage Mark Steyn, with Barney Frank diving into mosh pits, references to Cosmo magazine, and this gem-like writing:
If you’re one of the dwindling band of Bay Staters who rely on the [Boston] Globe for your news, you would never have known that a Massachusetts pseudo-“election” had bizarrely morphed into a real one — you know, with two candidates, just like they have in Bulgaria and places.
[snip]
“The educated class” turned out to be not that educated — if, by “educated,” you mean knowing stuff. They were dazzled by Obama: My former National Review colleague Christopher Buckley wrote cooing paeans to his “first-class intellect” and “temperament.” I used to joke that “temperament” was for the Obammysoxers of “the educated class” what hair was to Tiger Beat reporters. But you don’t really need analogies. As David Brooks noted after his first meeting with Obama, “I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant, and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.” And once you raised your eyes above pant level it only got better: “Our national oratorical superhero,” gushed New York magazine, “a honey-tongued Frankenfusion of Lincoln, Gandhi, Cicero, Jesus, and all our most cherished national acronyms (MLK, JFK, RFK, FDR).”
Read the whole thing here.
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2 Responses to “Mark Steyn on the upcoming Bay State election”
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Wow, Book, I just ran across Mark Steyn’s column and I rushed back here to alert you and your readers that he’s knocked another one out of the ball park! It’s wonderful, isn’t it?
In addition to your paragraphs above, I’d like to excerpt another one here. Yours above, and this one below, shows why we must never, ever trust David Brooks’ so-called “judgment” again.
Excerpt:
If Scott Brown gives Martha Coakley a run for her money on Election Day, Jan. 19, 2010, will be a direct consequence of Jan. 20, 2009. Once upon a time, Barack Obama, in the words of Newsweek editor Evan Thomas, was “standing above the country, above the world, he’s sort of God.” Seeking to explain why the God of Hope had fallen farther faster than any modern president, David Brooks of the New York Times argued that the tea-party movement had declared war on “the educated class.” He seemed to think this was some sort of inverted snobbery: If “the educated class” is for it – “health” “care” “reform,” cap-and-trade, Miranda rights for terrorists – Joe Six-Pack and his fellow knuckledragging morons are reflexively opposed to it.
I think Brooks has written some insightful stuff in the past, but his “educated class” analysis here totally misses the point. What has really happened is that the people he calls the “educated class” engaged in fashion-following and group-think on the issues he mentioned: people outside this class were much more likely to apply their own intelligence and hence, their opinions were less sheeplike and more diverse. The term “educated class” to represent the category of people Brooks is talking about is questionable, to put it gently. I suspect, for example, that someone who has a masters degree in electrical engineering from a state university in the south, coupled with an undergraduate double major in EE and in philosophy and a strong interest in history, would not quality, even though he likely knows more about practically any subject on earth than the typical Ivy League Obama voter. I’m reminded of C S Lewis’s description of his protagonist, a sociology professor, in his novel That Hideous Strength: It must be remembered that in Mark’s mind hardly one rag of noble thought, either Christian or Pagan, had a secure lodging. His education had been neither scientific nor classical – merely “Modern.” The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by: and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honour to help him. He was a man of straw, a glib examinee in subjects that require no exact knowledge.