Sunday, August 02, 2009
This morning I thought I needed to sell my books, not so much because I thought I needed to sell my books as because selling books is what other people do when they need to clear space or make emergency cash appear. The former at the moment presents less urgency than the latter, though in perusing my shelves for titles I could abandon I forgot entirely any original purpose, as I got lost flipping through the things I had read some years ago and, in certain cases, had not opened since.
I pulled out What's The Matter With Kansas?, which I read freshman year of college after the author appeared on The Daily Show, when the show was relatively mild and Jon Stewart was slightly less jaded with life. Most of what the author wrote in 2004 applied to politics five years before and applies five years after, a snippet following a quote of one of Ann Coulter's windblast comments being illustrative:
Coulter instantiates this thesis about the rich not by opening a copy of Fortune or Cigar Aficionado but by turning to what's on TV. See, there's all sorts of filth, put there by liberals. We know the liberal elite hate the common people because of what we see on the TV, what we read in highbrow modern fiction, all of which can be laid at the doorstep of liberalism. On the other hand, we know that the GOP is the true party of the workers, since the hard-guy Republican Tom DeLay is "more likely to have a beer with a trucker" than the wealthy senator Barbara Boxer of California. We know it because the two social possibilities of American life are mimicking the liberal "beautiful people" of Hollywood or embracing "the working-class hillbillies who go to NASCAR races," that favorite litmus test of the populist right.(Frank, Thomas. What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Metropolitan Books, New York, 2004. pgs. 117-118)
Apparently, there is no bad economic turn a conservative cannot do unto his buddy in the working class, as long as cultural solidarity has been cemented over a beer.
Why should I sell that? "Frank" is parked between "Foucault" and "Freud", who are succeeded by "Gaiman", "Gibbon", and "Gide". I decided to part with one of two copies of Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, but then:
It is Sunday; ergo, the bookstore is closed. Schade.
Labels: Ann Coulter, beer, books, bookshelf, economics, hillbillies, Jon Stewart, Kansas, liberalism, NASCAR, politics, quotes, television, The Daily Show, Thomas Frank, Tom DeLay, working-class
[Lauree Frances Keith concluded this diatribe at 7:11 AM]