Ever met anyone with Ivy League-itis, that malady that leads those who’ve gone to certain institutions of higher learning to see anyone who didn’t share their collegiate advantage as a sort of bluish blur? Not to generalize overmuch, but in my experience, many of these folks, certainly not all, love to hear themselves talk. It’s not that your point of view doesn’t count, it’s just that they find their own so much more interesting. When on the receiving end of such bloviating, beginning sentences rarely leads to finishing them. One such gentleman I knew loved his own opinions so much that as he expounded, he would openly put his hand in his pocket and, you know, move stuff around. I wish I was kidding.

This ramble was prompted by this extremely interesting post by William Deresiewicz at the American Scholar, who was dumbfounded by his lack of ability to interact with his plumber:

As two dozen years at Yale and Columbia have shown me, elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to flatter themselves for being there, and for what being there can do for them. The advantages of an elite education are indeed undeniable. You learn to think, at least in certain ways, and you make the contacts needed to launch yourself into a life rich in all of society’s most cherished rewards. To consider that while some opportunities are being created, others are being cancelled and that while some abilities are being developed, others are being crippled is, within this context, not only outrageous, but inconceivable. …

But it isn’t just a matter of class. My education taught me to believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me. We were “the best and the brightest,” as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright. I learned to give that little nod of understanding, that slightly sympathetic “Oh,” when people told me they went to a less prestigious college. (If I’d gone to Harvard, I would have learned to say “in Boston” when I was asked where I went to school–the Cambridge version of noblesse oblige.) I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to elite colleges, often precisely for reasons of class. I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to college at all.

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The whole thing is interesting, and well worth your time to read.

People love to go on about "liberal elitists," but as someone well to the leftward end of our political spectrum, this particular disease drives me batty, and it’s nothing to do with political ideology. It’s all about class. And the more conservatives tap into this class divide, the more middle-class people vote against their own interests. As I’ve maintained elsewhere, I think the worst offenders are the Republicans who’ve gone to such places and then played lower-class and middle-class voters of both parties for fools. Often, as Deresiewicz points out, liberal Ivy Leaguers at least mean well, but can’t connect because of the very problems he elucidates. Fascinating, as Spock would say.

And if you care, my colleges: North Texas (undergrad), Hollins University (grad), UMass-Amherst (grad). I dunno–Prairie League?

10/01/08

You thought he was suspending his campaign, but really McCain was off in the wilds of Arizona practicing his bailout plan with the help of the U.S. Army. He’s a man who knows bailouts.

Take this, Wall Street!

Bold and Spicy!

So look–the real deal is my last post way down below, so please feel free to check that out. But I just read some anonymous blog commenter’s contribution to the zeitgeist, and it cracked me up so much I figured some levity was in order.

Here, my friends, is the new Spice Girls lineup:

Baby Spice

Scary Spice

Bible Spice

Old Spice

09/29/08

It was something of a miracle that George Bush’s vote tally was higher than John Kerry’s in Ohio in 2004. Less of a miracle, of course, when you take into consideration Ohio’s Ken Blackwell, then Secretary of State, who did wonderful things like under-equip precincts in heavily African-American areas. There was also, of course, the county that counted behind closed doors because of a terrorism warning, since proven to be utterly bogus. It’s a terrifying and informative read to check out Robert F. Kennedy’s investigative article about these matters published in Rolling Stone.

But today, there’s an article over at Raw Story about Stephen Spoonamore, a Republican IT guy who apparently had some misgivings about what went down in 2004 and is now likely to make his colleague Mike Connell the proud owner of a subpoena because of it. Spoonamore is concerned that Connell was somehow involved in a scheme that put an extra step into reporting election results, first sending them on a little detour to Tennessee.

There are a lot of ins and outs and what-have-yous to keep you reading for a long time, but the most startling revelation in all of this is that the company in Chattanooga, Tennessee, called SmarTech, was (who knows–probably still is) the hub for a stunning load of GOP web activity, from Democratic smear sites and state GOP sites to the domain used by the White House to send email out of the prying eyes of public disclosure laws. Just who you would want to oversee those Ohio state election results before they went to the Ohio Secretary of State website.

Here’s the chart, from the original researchers in 2006, ePluribus Media, showing everything that was then hosted by SmarTech: