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.

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Our Local Urbanistas Versus Wal-Mart

Rabid Wal-Mart hater Tom Hansen sent select Venom 2020 subscribers a link to a website containing essays by Richard Carson, a professional urban planner in Oregon. For some reason, Carson's essay titled "The Urbanistas versus Big-Box Retail" was not on Hansen's list of favorites.

Carson totally skewers all the big-box bashers like Hansen, No Super Wal-Mart, PARD, et. al.

Some great quotes:

Unfortunately, too often people blur the line between land use issues and social issues. These days big-box is intentionally being associated with "suburban sprawl". But the illusion created by special-interest propaganda is the real issue. It is not necessarily about the economic or social reality. What we really have going on is the usual symbolism over substance tactics that are typical of many anti-growth organizations. Americans believe in a free citizenry and a free market economy. However, the Urbanistas do not believe in a free market when it comes to big box retail and they want citizens to live in their urban design fantasy land. They believe Americans need to be forced to live Potemkin villages reminiscent of the movie "The Truman Show".

In order for these social engineers to attract financial supporters and sympathetic voters, they use pejorative labels like "sprawl," "big-box" or "McMansion" and "category killers". They intentional play on the average citizen's distrust of corporate American and their tendency to say "Not in my back yard" in the face of any community change.

[snip]

In my opinion, the "Urbanistas" need to start dealing with the retail reality that Main Street America literally buys into big-box retail, and dump their negative rhetoric and their unsellable political agenda. May be they should take a tip from big-box retail and actually give American citizens something they actually care about. Like a political agenda that has an actual tangible value.

Al Norman has taken that "special-interest propaganda" nationwide and makes a nice living off of it.

Read the whole thing and learn the true agenda behind our "neighborhood activists."

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Sour Grapes from the Wealthy Residents of Pullman

Sore loser Chris Lupke of PARD wrote the following comment on Dnews.com about Susan Fagan's letter yesterday:

Susan,

Speaking as a Republican party official, you probably know you don't speak for the majority of Pullman residents just the more wealthy ones.

I hope Chris includes himself and other PARD members in that group of "more wealthy Pullman residents." A search of the 2007 Washington State University List of Employees, Job Title and Salary database reveals the following yearly salaries:

Alex Hammond: $61,512.84
Chris Lupke: $62,872.65
Nella Van Dyke: $63,868.32
TV Reed: $89,268.80
Howard Hosick: $95,878.80
Greg Hooks: $99,576.00
James "Uncle Buck" Krueger: $217,333.80 (who said studying deer testicles would never pay off?)

Average Family Income in Pullman: $40,709

Average Family Income of a Wal-Mart Shopper: $35,000

It seems the people fighting Wal-Mart in Pullman are the ones wealthy enough not to have to shop there. Not surprising really. Americans who self-identify as liberals have an average annual income of $71,000 – the highest-grossing political category in America. So much for Republicans being the "party of the rich man."

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Say What?

Sadly, the reality of living in a capitalist society is that not everyone can “make it” the way Rossi did. A lot of people work their entire lives and never see the same type of success. For that reason, it makes little sense for someone in Rossi’s position to represent a working-class public.

- Amir Hassan, "Rossi needs to tell the truth to voters," Summer Watermelon, June 23, 2008

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

- Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776

You see Amir and his fellow Marxist-Leninist "progressives" wish to turn the words of our Founding Fathers around completely backwards. They believe that all men are not created equal but all men are guaranteed equal happiness (at least happiness as the government defines it.)

Rather than someone from an immigrant family who has "made it" in the private sector like Rossi, Mr. Hassan would prefer Queen Christine, who has never worked a day in her life outside the bureaucracy of state government, to represent the "working class" as Governor.

And they say Republicans are bigots.

"Lesson was counterproductive"

Another great letter in today's Moscow-Pullman Daily News from Terry Day:

WSU architecture Professor Ayad Rahmani makes some valuable observations about Pullman's Bishop Boulevard (Opinion, April 18); observations all the more important because we're about to see similar "architorture" practiced along the Pullman-Moscow corridor.

But with all due respect, I'm going to file his methods under "politorture."

Conjuring a protest unfortunately elicits media coverage, and there may even be some value in raising public awareness about these planning and zoning issues; but Rahmani's methods countervail his stated purpose of teaching architecture students a civics lesson.

Best he leave civics to someone better qualified to teach it.

The lesson he taught is counterproductive of his own aims, which is to influence Pullman planning and zoning in a direction that he believes will produce a people-friendlier built environment.

Better he teach his students to attend meetings of relevant city boards, and city council meetings, and perhaps develop an educational report on architorture instead of encouraging students to organize an in-your-face protest that likely will push the community further from the goals he espouses in his profession.

Terence L. Day, Pullman

"Proud of Bishop Boulevard"

For those of you without a subscription to the Moscow-Pullman Daily News, below is my letter to the editor that ran on Monday.

In addition to making the obvious comparison between Professor Ayad Rahmani's elitism and that displayed by Barack Obama in his "bitter Americans" statement, I wanted to make a deeper, more subtle point.

Many of Rahmani's cheerleaders, including Chuck Pezeshki and Chris Lupke, are proponents of locally-owned businesses versus national chains. Yet, there are no chain stores on Bishop other than Safeway (yet.) There are only locally-owned businesses (Fireside Grille, Village Centre Cinemas, Corporate Pointe, Crimson and Gray, Zeppoz, Barnacle Bill's, et. al.) and locally-owned and -operated franchises (Radio Shack, Absolute Fitness, Jiffy Lube, Holiday Inn Express, et. al.)

Do we as a community really want to impose onerous and expensive architectural requirements on the types of businesses we supposedly want to encourage just to please the aesthetic sensibilities of a few professors? That will make our local businesses even less competitive with national chains. I'm quite proud of all the progress on Bishop Blvd. over the last 10 years. The sidewalks will come later when the city has more money and the Bishop build-out is complete.

For example, up in Hayden, the city negotiated with Wal-Mart to have the facade of the store tan and brown with rock veneer "to blend with the rustic flavor Hayden Lake is trying to develop as part of a revitalization project." That's chump change to Wal-Mart; merely the cost of doing business. They are dropping $600,000 to put in stop lights down in Clarkston. But that's a very big deal to a small business.

From Monday's Moscow-Pullman Daily News:

Prior to Professor Ayad Rahmani's "architorture" faux-protest a few weeks back, I had heard only pride expressed about the buildings on Bishop Boulevard from Pullman residents, civic leaders and elected officials. Many have rightfully praised native son Duane Brelsford Jr.'s Corporate Pointe, Fireside Grille, and Village Centre Cinemas, as well as the new Pullman Regional Hospital.

Now, much as presidential candidate Barack Obama has been doing for the past week, Rahmani, who called Bishop Boulevard "counter-human," has tried to perform damage control (Opinion, April 18.)

Unfortunately for Rahmani, his Viewpoint column in the Oct. 26 issue of WSU Today completely undermined his efforts.

Sure, Rahmani is concerned about the "built environment," but only because a "worldly faculty member wants to be proud of his or her choice of place, not making apologies to those who visit" and "high-class faculty will refuse to live in scattered and inconsequential buildings."

His call for the public and the private sectors to work together also rings hollow. In his column, Rahmani claimed only the university can "save" Pullman. Pullman's housing represents the "worst of the effects of a market economy." Developers persist in building homes with "materials and planning that are highly wasteful and unsustainable." The city is "too bogged down in trying to increase tax revenues to worry about the role of architecture in improving matters." Rahmani advocated a Washington State University land grab on Grand Avenue, which "shows little beyond gas stations and neglected farm buildings," under the guise of "student housing."

Rahmani stated, "This need not be a divisive issue." Unfortunately, we nonworldly, low-class, nonfaculty types get bitter. We cling to offensive "mcmansions" with garages or inconsequential cookie-cutter homes or antipathy to people who insult and disparage our town and the people who live in it as a way to explain our frustrations.

Tom Forbes, Pullman

Spoktopia

In today's New York Times, Timothy Egan has a unintentionally hilarious elegy to the "lost small town" of Spokane (metro area population around 625,000) that was "devastated" when Kaiser Aluminium collapsed. I'm sure Spokane seems like Dogpatch to the New York urban sophisticates sipping their skinny, half-caf, soy milk, no foam lattes and tut-tutting the plight of the poor rubes out there in flyover country. If only they would vote Democratic!

Conspicuously absent from Egan's apologia of the Obamessiah is the role labor unions and asbestos lawsuits played in Kaiser's demise. So is the fact that none of the natural resource industries that built Spokane (timber, mining, etc.) would be possible now under current environmental regulations, not to mention concern over "climate changing" energy usage and emissions and the lawsuit-happy NIMBY-state Washington has become. All these business- and job-killing factors, promulgated and championed by liberal Democrats, are somehow Dubya's and the Republican's fault.

And in Egan's eyes, the sins of Crackerquiddick are washed away, because rock star and patron saint of the working class Bruce Springsteen has endorsed Obama. After all, "The Boss" once sang a song that had the line "these jobs are going boys and they ain’t coming back.”

I especially like some of the online comments on the article:

"The bad lands of eastern Washington have been dead and gone for years."

"From my perspective, there is a cultural inbreeding and resistance to change and better ideas in small-town heartland America that is more responsible for the decay there than any of the factors many inhabitants of the heartland blame."

"Another aspect of small town living is their isolation. Making a sweeping generalization you can say that the people between the mountain ranges are different than those that are on the coasts. The former are protected and look inward the latter are unprotected and look outward. Spokane is even more isolated."

You know, come to think of it, I did see a boy playing a banjo on a front porch the other day while I was driving around Pullman...

As the Dems focus on class and culture, instead of the economy, Iraq, immigration, etc., they are snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

BREAKING NEWS: WSU School of "Architorture" Not Done Insulting Pullman

Palousitics has just learned of plans by the WSU School of Architecture and Construction Management to stage another PR event insulting Pullman. Professor Rahmani's demonstration was just the tip of the iceberg apparently.

In addition, I have learned of leftist political indoctinration occurring within the school. "Tempest in a teapot?" Hardly.

MANY more details later.

"Bishop Boulevard growth fine as it is"

There was a great letter in the April 3 edition of the Daily News from Larry Hodge, a former member of the Latah Economic Development Council:

Friday's headline said 'Students protest city's 'architorture' " (Page 1A, March 28).

Students from professor Ayad Rahmani's WSU architecture class were protesting development of Bishop Boulevard.

Reading the article, one would believe that in the past, downtowns such as Pullman and Moscow were developed out of a very well-planned sense of cohesion, with only approved architecture being allowed. Nothing could be further from the truth. The only thing planned was the road system with lots and blocks laid out in a rectangular system where topography allowed. The buildings were constructed by developers using their own designs, building one here and one there, infilling until most of the lots were taken.

Bishop Boulevard is being developed just as it should be. One model for urban development does not fit all situations. Just like we need large houses, small houses, and houses with different architecture we need more than a downtown offers. Downtowns are wonderful and none of us wants to give up on ours, but other types of development in different areas should not be viewed with such disdain. The people of Pullman should be proud of buildings like the Pullman Regional Hospital, Brelsford's University Pointe office complex, and Zeppoz. They all add a unique perspective to an environment that was never meant to be downtown.

There are many different views of what is appropriate building design and lot layout and there is always room for improvement, but organizing a design review board as professor Rahmani suggests is not the answer. Having someone else tell me what color I should paint my house is not what America is about and I hope it never will be.

Larry J. Hodge, Moscow

"Candidate on a High Horse"

George Will has a great column in today's Washington Post dissecting Obama's condescending remarks about small-town Americans. Eltitism is not about class or affluence. It's about attitude.

FDR came from a very wealthy background, yet he never ran America or the working class down. When I was growing up in rural Franklin County, Virginia, everyone was a Democrat. Republicans rarely bothered to run for any public office. This was a legacy of FDR, who focused on rural and working Americans during the Depresssion.

However, following 1968, when the Democratic Party began to attack America and embrace far-left, out of the mainstream ideals, that hegemony gradually started to break down. The breakdown was complete by the mid-Nineties, when the Congressman from our district, Virgil Goode, switched from the Democrats to the Republicans. Now, you would be hard-pressed to find many Democrats in my home town.

Jim Webb, a war hero and former Republican Secretary of the Navy who turned Democrat, barely won a Senate seat in Virginia in 2006. He did it by running as a man of the people, not an elitist like Obama. In fact, Webb has been called a "boor" (by George Will), refers to diversity programs as “state-sponsored racism,” thinks immigration is too permissive, believes free trade and globalization are bad, and in 2007, his aide was arrested for carrying Webb's loaded pistol into a Senate office building (Webb has held a CCW in Virginia for a long time, probably one of the only Senator's to have one.) In other words, Webb is the fulfillment of Obama's "bitter white person."

Obama would do well to learn that lesson.

Barack Obama may be exactly what his supporters suppose him to be. Not, however, for reasons most Americans will celebrate.

Obama may be the fulfillment of modern liberalism. Explaining why many working-class voters are "bitter," he said they "cling" to guns, religion and "antipathy to people who aren't like them" because of "frustrations." His implication was that their primitivism, superstition and bigotry are balm for resentments they feel because of America's grinding injustice.

By so speaking, Obama does fulfill liberalism's transformation since Franklin Roosevelt. What had been under FDR a celebration of America and the values of its working people has become a doctrine of condescension toward those people and the supposedly coarse and vulgar country that pleases them.

When a supporter told Adlai Stevenson, the losing Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956, that thinking people supported him, Stevenson said, "Yes, but I need to win a majority." When another supporter told Stevenson, "You educated the people through your campaign," Stevenson replied, "But a lot of people flunked the course." Michael Barone, in "Our Country: The Shaping of America From Roosevelt to Reagan," wrote: "It is unthinkable that Roosevelt would ever have said those things or that such thoughts ever would have crossed his mind." Barone added: "Stevenson was the first leading Democratic politician to become a critic rather than a celebrator of middle-class American culture -- the prototype of the liberal Democrat who would judge ordinary Americans by an abstract standard and find them wanting."

Stevenson, like Obama, energized young, educated professionals for whom, Barone wrote, "what was attractive was not his platform but his attitude." They sought from Stevenson "not so much changes in public policy as validation of their own cultural stance." They especially rejected "American exceptionalism, the notion that the United States was specially good and decent," rather than -- in Michelle Obama's words -- "just downright mean."

The emblematic book of the new liberalism was "The Affluent Society" by Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith. He argued that the power of advertising to manipulate the bovine public is so powerful that the law of supply and demand has been vitiated. Manufacturers can manufacture in the American herd whatever demand the manufacturers want to supply. Because the manipulable masses are easily given a "false consciousness" (another category, like religion as the "opiate" of the suffering masses, that liberalism appropriated from Marxism), four things follow:
First, the consent of the governed, when their behavior is governed by their false consciousnesses, is unimportant. Second, the public requires the supervision of a progressive elite which, somehow emancipated from false consciousness, can engineer true consciousness. Third, because consciousness is a reflection of social conditions, true consciousness is engineered by progressive social reforms. Fourth, because people in the grip of false consciousness cannot be expected to demand or even consent to such reforms, those reforms usually must be imposed, for example, by judicial fiats.

The iconic public intellectual of liberal condescension was Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, who died in 1970 but whose spirit still permeated that school when Obama matriculated there in 1981. Hofstadter pioneered the rhetorical tactic that Obama has revived with his diagnosis of working-class Democrats as victims -- the indispensable category in liberal theory. The tactic is to dismiss rather than refute those with whom you disagree.

Obama's dismissal is: Americans, especially working-class conservatives, are unable, because of their false consciousness, to deconstruct their social context and embrace the liberal program. Today that program is to elect Obama, thereby making his wife at long last proud of America.

Hofstadter dismissed conservatives as victims of character flaws and psychological disorders -- a "paranoid style" of politics rooted in "status anxiety," etc. Conservatism rose on a tide of votes cast by people irritated by the liberalism of condescension.

Obama voiced such liberalism with his "bitterness" remarks to an audience of affluent San Franciscans. Perfect.

When Democrats convened in San Francisco in 1984, en route to losing 49 states, Jeane Kirkpatrick -- a former FDR Democrat then serving in the Cabinet of another such, Ronald Reagan -- said "San Francisco Democrats" are people who "blame America first." Today they blame Americans for America being "downright mean."

Obama's apology for his embittering sociology of "bitterness" -- "I didn't say it as well as I should have" -- occurred in Muncie, Ind. Perfect.

In 1929 and 1937, Robert and Helen Lynd published two seminal books of American sociology. They were sympathetic studies of a medium-size manufacturing city they called "Middletown," coping -- reasonably successfully, optimistically and harmoniously -- with life's vicissitudes. "Middletown" was in fact Muncie, Ind.

The Official Palousitics Song

There's been some discussion by the Blogfather about what would be a better campaign video for McCain in response to Obama's small-town smackdown: Bocephus' A Country Boy Can Survive or Trace Adkins' Songs About Me.

My vote is for Montgomery Gentry's You Do Your Thing, which I hereby declare to be the official Palousitics song.

Say What?

But how one uses their First Amendment rights is also a bellwether of where they want that society to go. And it matters even more in a small university community, where we all live together and, hopefully, are all growing together. There’s never going to be perfect harmony here — nor anywhere. But to what end, all of this behavior?

- Chuck "Mr. Civil Discourse" Pezeshki, "Time for Community Building at WSU,", Moscow-Pullman Daily News, November 21, 2006

But to pick an issue that one might care about and do something legal and political once in a semester? These are young adults we're educating. We'd like them to become active citizens someday. Anything we can do to engage them and stop the inherent sleepwalking through the curriculum that too many of our students already do is a good thing.

- Chuck "Mr. Civil Discourse" Pezeshki, "'Architorture' protest brings on tempest in a teapot," Moscow-Pullman Daily News, April 12, 2008

I guess Chuck's idea of where he wants the society in "our small university community" to go depends on whether it's the College Republicans protesting or one of his "hip," fellow elitist leftist professors.

By the way, Chuck, you can certainly do better than label anyone opposing Rahmani's PR stunt as mouthbreathing members of the local John Birch Society. Pullman residents were offended by Rahmani's overweening arrogance and snobbery, all funded on the taxpayer's dime.

"Protest only served prof's cause"

It's official: Ayad Rahmani's "architorture" protest was a big flop. The only thing he succeeded in doing was igniting a debate on teaching methods, not community planning. Hopefully, we've seen the first and last of these arrogant spectacles.

This is Steve McClure's op-ed on behalf of the entire editorial staff that appeared in yesterday's Moscow-Pullman Daily News:

Washington State University professor Ayad Rahmani's faux-protest along Bishop Boulevard played into all the less-desirable stereotypes of a town-gown controversy.

If that was his goal, he succeeded.

Anything beyond that, however, and his gathering students to protest the design of buildings and sidewalks in the developing area of southern Pullman was little more than a publicity stunt.

He argues students didn't have to participate in the March 27 protest, which took place during the regularly scheduled class period. Those who wanted to write a paper arguing their position could receive the same credit.

We find that a bit hollow since most students will choose the path of least resistance - in this case, joining a hundred classmates for a cup of coffee and a picket.

There are hundreds of ways for students at WSU to become engaged in their community. Dropping by a parking lot for a protest two months before graduation hardly ranks near the top of the list.

Those 100 students could have spent that same class hour working with practicing architects to discover how to incorporate the desired aesthetics into an architectural rendering that works for a paying client.

If Rahmani wanted to give his students a strong life lesson, he should send them to planning commission meetings for a sense of how architects and developers work through the process. That also might give those students an idea of the challenges people confront when it comes time to develop property.

A two-mile stretch of road doesn't suddenly convert into a vibrant business district with a wave of a wand - it takes money and usually happens over a period of years.

In other words, teach these students what it will be like when they're pitching their plans to the people who will be financing the construction of their creative vision.

Quote of the Day

Angela Congdon thinks the city of Pullman could have done better when planning Bishop Boulevard.

The 21-year-old Washington State University student said the boulevard's box stores (?) and strip malls add no quality to the Pullman community and detract from the well-planned, pedestrian-friendly downtown area.

"There's no cohesion," she said of recent construction along the boulevard. "Everything is random."

[...]

Congdon, who came to Pullman from the north Seattle area, said she likely wouldn't have initiated the protest without Rahmani's leadership. But she wanted to leave her mark on Pullman, since she soon will leave town to finish her degree at WSU-Spokane.

-"Students protest city's 'architorture'," Moscow-Pullman Daily News, March 28, 2008

Bye Angela. Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

Don't forget to e-mail Professor Ayad Rahmani at arahmani@wsu.edu and WSU President Elson Floyd at floyde@wsu.edu and let them how you feel about the taxpayer-funded insulting of Pullman during "Cougar Pride Days."

The Elitism Of Queen Nancy

In a lengthy article in this morning's Lewiston Tribune, Moscow's mayor answers the accusation that she's an elitist. In doing so, she proves her critics' point.

"I've read that some people say I'm a social elitist and academic snob or something. Well, forget that. I think some people think that because I have good posture and reasonable grammar."

No doubt she believes that she stands out because she has a full compliment of front teeth too. Just where the hell does she think she lives? This is a college town where nearly everybody can string complete sentences together and mostly get their spelling right.

And BTW, who believes that she voted for Ronald Reagan?

I believe that just as much as I believe Barack Obama's claim that the didn't know anything about his pastor's racism and America hating.