An Elitist Snob's Take on Wal-Mart Shoppers

Attention Wal-Mart Shoppers: Here's what the educated elite really think about you. Coastal liberal and long-time Wal-Mart hater Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic magazine wrote the following description of how he saw folks at a Wal-Mart in Martinsburg, WV back on June 23, 2008:

But about those down-and-out customers: If you want to see the underside of the unregulated capitalist economy, the people who can't find the non-existent escape ladder from poverty and its pathologies, visit the Martinsburg, West Virginia Wal-Mart. Morbid obesity; spontaneous, public bouts of corporal punishment directed against dirty children; ten-year girls dressed as whores; tattoos running up necks and down legs; smoking like you only see these days in Baku; it's all here. I considered myself a socialist until I was about 23 (that was when I fled my kibbutz for the final time) but a visit to the Martinsburg Wal-Mart reawakens my distaste for steroidal capitalism.

Goldberg later refers to Wal-Mart workers as "hopeless and toothless." What a collection of stereotypes of working class Americans, straight out of Marx's Grim Fairy Tales of the Lumpenproletariat.

Now, as you can imagine, this column set off quite an uproar in Martinsburg. Rather than apologize, Goldberg states:

It's interesting to me how many people conflate an attack on Wal-Mart with an attack on their community. I suppose this just how the malevolent merchants from Bentonville, Ark., would have it.

Yeah. Wal-Mart made Goldberg an arrogant and self-righteous asshole. Who knows though? Maybe Goldberg is a double agent for Wal-Mart; his overbearing pretentiousness discrediting other Wal-Mart haters. But let's face it. "Ten-year girls dressed as whores?" It WAS a vicious attack on the Martinsburg community, and more generally an attack on all the people who shop at Wal-Mart.

And that ultimately is what the war on Wal-Mart is all about. It's rank class hatred, bigotry and pure snobbery from wealthy elitists towards the people they claim to be "protecting" from Wal-Mart.

But I for one am glad for Goldberg's hateful rant. Next time you read in the Daily News about "$45,000 traffic studies" and "wreaking havoc on small towns," you'll know what those code words really mean.

Technorati Tags: wal-mart walmart

Barack Hussein Obama, Exposed

Cross post from paulezimmerman.com



My apologies for the overlap with other page elements here. This thing is big... but so is the subject matter.

"I've pretty much lost sympathy for most of the working people on the Palouse"

For those of you who doubt that professors are elitist snobs, I submit as Exhibit A the arrogant, bitter, socialistic rantings of Chuck "Mr. Civil Discourse" Pezeshki. If you don't have access to the online version of the Moscow-Pullman Daily News, Chuckie is posting comments on Dnews.com bitching about the Saturday article that reported poor ol' impoverished WSU profs only make on average $92,000 a year.

Pezeshki's comments are some of the most amusing pieces of left-wing intelligentsia fluffery I've read yet and pull back the curtain on how our faculty libs really feel about the issues. His comments demonstrate quite well why we have no reason to ever fear the campus moonbats getting into political power locally.

One thing that really has to change if the relationship between the towns and the universities is to improve is that the towns need to stop HATING the professors that have chosen to come here for their rank and salary. These professors drive the quality of life in our cities, and their taxes pay for many things that people with lower salaries cannot. The universities also profoundly boost the average income in the area.

Mind you, Chuck's happy with his salary. He's just pissed off there's not more genuflecting to our Ph.D. betters like him. And he wonders why people "hate" professors? Chuck forgets one very important point: IT IS THE "FILTHY WORKING CLASS" HE DESPISES SO MUCH THAT PAYS HIS DAMN SALARY AND FOR ALL OF HIS TRIPS TO LONDON, VIENNA, ET. AL. WITH THEIR TAXES! YOU DON'T LIKE SUCKING OFF THE GOVERNMENT TEAT? THEN GO GET A JOB IN THE REAL WORLD WHERE YOU HAVE TO MAKE A PROFIT AND PRODUCE RESULTS, RATHER THAN FLINGING DISDAIN FOR THOSE WITH NO LETTERS AFTER THEIR NAME LIKE YOU!!

Sorry, A G. You get no sympathy from me-- and I've gotten to the point where I've pretty much lost sympathy for most of the working people on the Palouse as well.

If you poll most of the professors on campus, they are for higher taxes, which would predominantly affect the rich. Most of the professors are for socialized medicine, which would profoundly help the working poor and lower middle class in the area. Most professors would be for some form of low-rent, subsidized housing in the area. The one thing that the professors are mostly against is sprawl, and loss of community character, because that's the one draw we have going here.

But it's the working classes that are convinced that these things are the enemy. So be it.

I agree that people ought to be appreciative of the good fortune they have. But it's that doggone MARKET I keep hearing about from the lower-middle class that votes for Republicans that's supposed to raise them up and bring us down. It just doesn't seem to be working that way, though.

I've never seen a more dysfunctional, irrational culture in a 1st World country than what's on the Palouse. Keep voting against your interests, and alienating your intellectual and real allies. It's really worked great so far, hasn't it? Your children are being sent to war, your paycheck is dropping, and I can tell you from where the currency rate sits, the bottom is about to drop out from underneath the dollar, making those 'Guaranteed Low Walmart Prices' a thing of sunny memory.

I'm not happy about any of this. And having run for office to try to stop this, I've put my money where my mouth is. But it's exhausting, personally, the level of acrimony from the community. Myself, as well as others-- the ones that would really be interested in sharing community leadership, are really at the point of almost checking out.

Just remember, when the Gods want to punish you, they grant you your wishes.

Best,

Chuck

Are the arrogant, know-it-all, meddling, elitist, communist professors really going to check out of the Palouse? From your lips to God's ears, Chuck.

You Can't Make Stuff Like This Up

Dr. Forbes and I attended the University of Idaho Homecoming parade in Moscow yesterday as one kid was marching in the Lincoln Middle School band and another in the Pullman High School band.

Queen Nancy led off the parade in the "Sustainablemobile," a biodiesel-powered VW Bug, followed ironically and fittingly enough by a big-ass, gas-guzzling Idaho Army National Guard HMMWV painted in bright, patriotic red, white and blue, filled with young men wearing black berets and Army Combat Uniforms.

But the best was yet to come. The Moscow Civic Association was out in force, 30 or 40 strong, touting their three city council candidates. The ponytailed old hippie dudes, the long, gray-haired old hippie chicks, the dapper metrosexuals, and the "The Simpsons" Comic Book Guys were riding their bikes, waving their signs and flags, banging their drums, and playing their trombones. It was like some freakish touring company of the jongleur show at a Berekely Renaissance Fair.

But even that amusing spectacle was not the best part. The members of the MCA were all wearing RED SCARVES, just like the Young Pioneer organization in the former Soviet Union. I wonder if anyone else caught the significance.

I told Dr. Forbes that, unbelievably, these were the people in charge of Moscow, and God help me, part of me wants them to hang around in power for a few more years. How much better does Pullman look with these blatant communists running Moscow? This is the best thing that has ever happened to Whitman County and Pullman business people. Unfortunately, I think the voters in Moscow will take those red scarves and choke the MCA with them in three weeks.

Neocommies

I saw this column at American Thinker after reading the link Michael posted a few days ago. It is certainly incendiary, but it sure rings true, especially these parts:

There is a compelling factual case to be made that the contemporary radical Left can properly be called "Neocommunist." The Hard Left is grounded in Marxist vision of creating a "new man" under a system led by a vanguard that knows best what the rest of society needs. And Neocommies behave in patterns with startling parallels to Old Communist tactics.

The Neocommies are not members of a Communist Party, and are part more of a movement than a conspiracy. They are utterly different from traditional liberalism in America and Europe. Traditional liberals were democratic -- people like Hubert Humphrey, Scoop Jackson and Harry Truman. They fought passionately against the Totalitarian Left, as Ronald Reagan did when he was president of the Screen Actors Guild. Reagan started as a democratic liberal, and became the most famous conservative of the 20th century. As he said so often, he didn't leave the Democratic Party -- it left him.

[...]

In the US, of course, the NeoCommunists were the Sixties Radicals who decided to carry on a "Long March through the Institutions." That means the college faculties, the high schools, the media, Hollywood, and government.

[...]

The methods of Neocommunism parallel those of Old Communism to an astonishing degree.

The routine use of orchestrated group lying (so that many different people are suddenly making the same accusation );


The constant use of innocent-sounding front groups like MoveOn.org and Media Matters;

The use of stooges (like military retirees, both real and phony);

The need to whip up the rage of the faithful with constant disinformation about the enemy (i.e., America and conservatives);

The infiltration of media and government. Members of the seventies left are sprinkled throughout these institutions, carrying out the long march. These tricks are all straight out of the old, old playbook. Karl Marx really was a genius agitator and revolutionary plotter, though nothing else. Marx is still the model.

In the Democratic Party, the former radical Henry Wallace wing now controls the Party under a different label, because adopting different disguises is the essence of revolutionary konspiratia. (Konspiratia has been one of the biggest Russian indoor sports since Ivan the Terrible. Americans are just pikers by comparison.)

The worst example of PC re-labeling is what the Hard Left has done to the word "liberal." Our current Left is anything but "liberal." They are not concerned with liberty. They have nothing good to say about John Locke, John Stuart Mill, or Thomas Jefferson. Instead, they impose PC speech control wherever possible, including in the mainstream media. They try to intimidate anyone who disagrees, and have purged professors in universities by accusing them of the current smear labels: Racist, Sexist, Homophobe. A distinguished older scholar I know was harassed some twenty years ago when the PC Police took over his college. His scholarly journals were thrown into the garbage and his office was trashed. He was attacked verbally by radical students in his classes, who were openly encouraged by old-style Marxist professors. My friend ended up resigning from his tenured job, had a heart-attack, somehow survived it and retired. These radicals are not liberals, no matter how much they try to use that label.

There are many similar stories from the Putsch period of the New Left -- starting roughly in the 1970s, when the Boomer Lefties were graduating from the colleges where they had been radicalized. That's when the PC Commissars started to take over, often by simply harassing their enemies.

Today, they're in charge on the campuses. President Lawrence Summers lost his job at Harvard, and was recently blackballed at UC Davis, for offending against Politically Correct Orthodoxy. Larry Summers came to fame as a Clinton Administration official -- a liberal, but not ideologically Stalinist enough for the Hard Left.

The New Left utilized "affirmative action," Black Studies and Women's Studies to bring in new indoctrinated troops, and to drive out objective scholarship from humanities departments. Science and engineering departments tended to be a little more resistant, because they had to deal with facts in the real world. The same seems to be true in business and economics departments. For honest humanities scholarship the Left substituted frauds like "post-modernism," "deconstructionism," and "Critical Theory." Those were just new labels for the old vinegar. While those hot new ideas are now dying of ennui, their true believers are going back to the old Marxist gospel. What's that song about the old-time religion? Well, the Left is going back to the old-time religion of Communism. The best proof is that the very word "communism" is now strictly Verboten by the PC Commissars, who don't want to be exposed.

Wow, does that not sound like the leftists of PARD, the WSU Comparative Ethnic Studies department and the Moscow Civic Association or what? Scary stuff. Read the whole thing.

Socialism Explained

A Picture Worth 10,000 Words

A Wal-Mart Supercenter, the sine pari of capitalism, located in the former East Berlin on a street named for the founder of communism.

The fact we don't have one in Pullman yet proves that there are more socialists here than in a former communist country.

HT: Right Mind