Picturesque Masses: The Costly Aesthetic of Our Pampered Intelligentsia

Idiots, or evil geniuses?

That’s the question I continue to pose myself about members of our ruling elite, and particularly about our new leader. Mr. CHANGE himself. The promised middle-class tax cut is trundling toward the guillotine already, the House of Obama having been warned since the early days of the campaign that there was no money to fund a resurrection of Camelot. Energy prices will be ratcheted up by the “cap and trade” program to an extent which will dwarf the predations of now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t tax cuts on ordinary households. A Palace Spokesman told Neil Cavuto this week that the masses would actually save money: since they couldn’t afford to heat or cool their homes any longer, they would simply learn to do without. This, admittedly, was the formulation of a pompous idiot (who apparently ALSO failed to reflect that, besides gleefully recommending the life of a Massai tribesman to teachers and accountants in Jefferson City, he would be bankrupting power companies, should the scheme actually work).

On a broader scale, however, our black/white now-I-mean-it-now-I-don’t president is adroitly using Green Politics to accustom our nation to a lower living standard and to sweeping decrees from the executive. Rush Limbaugh and Dick Morris believe that sabotage of the American republic has been his objective from the start. I tend to agree, though I also believe the man to be more sensitive to and needful of public adulation than these prophets of doom allow. Brilliant is the thorough efficiency with which he has already, in one hundred days, commandeered the private sector and duped an electorate with half of its collective face constantly in a cell phone. Weak-witted is the gullibility implicit in Obama’s continued expectation of being ever more loved as the nation ever more transparently melts down on his watch.

Depressing but true: the “progressive” mind has always been a paradoxical mix of delicate perception and emotional infantilism. Since I undertook a couple of years ago to read all of Jules Romains’s Hommes de Bonne Volonté in French (over 5000 pages of small print), I have seldom suffered the kind of pain through which Le Monde Est Ton Aventure (the twentieth novel of twenty-seven) has put me. Here I find myself wondering if the author can truly be having a profoundly ironic chuckle at the expense of his favorite characters—or if, rather, he is not laying bare his own obtuse liberal idealism as though its frustration were a natural part of a sentimental education. The political attaché Jerphanion and the journalist Jallez, along with about half a dozen other characters of more dubious motives, are sucked into an eastward trek toward the newly formed Soviet Union through a kind of mesmerism reminiscent of what drew the Close Encounters horde to the space ship. They simply have to know! Is there indeed hope for humanity—can the slate be wiped clean of privilege and abuse once and for all? Can men live together as brothers from now on?

If they can, the Soviet Union fails to indicate how—and Romains is at least intellectually honest enough to present the dog having its day with stark clarity. Ne’er-do-wells and cutthroats ascend to the top by denouncing their fellow citizens and creating their own black market. Thuggish officials pretend to scrutinize papers which they hold upside-down. Jallez is at one point imprisoned because the text of his first article is snatched from the mail, opened, read in some cursory fashion, and deemed the work of a “spy” for being insufficiently flattering. His life is spared only because Jerphanion’s boss, a high-ranking French politico, is receiving a thorough lubrication from the Soviet propaganda machine as he tours the Black Sea region and shows an interest in his countryman.

What bothers me about all this is that it should be packaged as some sort of revelation. Jallez and his sidekick, the English journalist Bartlett, spend far too much time on their fundaments by the windows of boats, trains, carriages, and cars. They look and, very whimsically, they judge. This place is like that place… like the coast of North Africa, or like Brussels, or like a poor section of Paris. As they compare notes, they follow their whimsy to a comfortable or uncomfortable conclusion: not enough people in the streets, not the right expression on the people’s faces, a suspicious dearth of healthy trees. One could easily imagine an interior decorator squinting and working angles to arrive at similar evaluations of a table’s placement or wallpaper pattern’s effects. They seem to believe, these two, that the world is morally obligated to tickle their aesthetic sense. The previous novel had ended as the same pair bounced along in a carriage outside Rome, Jallez commenting that the telegraph lines running into the city had spoiled the countryside.

I wouldn’t half blame Lenin’s goons if they had indeed executed Jallez. In fact, a great deal of our present travail is being fueled by the pampered offspring of our guilt-ridden, pseudo-educated bourgeoisie, to whom things just don’t look right, or feel right. A black president makes them feel better (though the hidden truth that he is half white—and thoroughly white in his educational and professional history—makes them feel better still). A good economic flailing for past abuses of the environment will also be picturesque (especially since whatever lash falls upon their spine is sure to be silken, or so they suppose). Peaceful words in the direction of any ferocious assassin have a soothing effect (soothing to them—but surely the assassin, too, will gratefully seize the extended hand).

These people are the real idiots—the idiot savants who haven’t the excuse of a low IQ to justify their ruinous self-coddling. I’ve seen them all my life in academe: I’ve been at the receiving end of their sneers when, at a job interview or a conference, I admitted reluctantly that I was from Texas. I would notice at such times that my briefcase was ragged compared to theirs, that my shoes didn’t match my belt as theirs did, that my coat didn’t sit molded around my shoulders like theirs. I did not have an initialed leather case for my pens; and my hair (which I have cut myself for years to save a few bucks) did not lie just so to the last strand, exuding a rare scent. Some screener had made a mistake: I should never have been admitted into the same room as they—these magnanimous saviors of the oppressed, these high-minded visionaries who foresee a world without privilege.

Historically, there have always been precisely two reliable energy sources for class warfare: the utterly destitute who sniff out a chance of getting something for nothing, and the well-heeled children of the haute bourgeoisie who have grown bored with having everything and find the inequity of the landscape around them painful to behold. Mr. Obama has managed to enlist both in the dismantling of the republic. It remains to be seen if enough of us in the middle, who refuse to cheat though others will always do so and who accept few favors though we readily grant them, still exist to counterpoise the centrifugal forces of nihilism and narcissism.