As a community college student back in the day, my college’s football team (Bakersfield College) would host a team from the LA area. LA team supporters would chant “sooie” while amply spicing their outbursts with “redneck” and “hayseed” and cow bells. I didn’t think much of it because our team frequently sent them packing soundly defeated, but the incident came to mind as I listened to Michael Bloomberg’s denigration of farmers. Cosmopolitanism is classically meant to indicate a broad exposure leading to refinement. No more. It’s a synonym for narrow-mindedness. Bigotry can be found not only under Klan robes but also in faculty lounges, corporate boardrooms, and Manhattan penthouses.
Bloomberg has as much familiarity with agriculture as the Peter Sellers character, Chance, in the movie “Being There”, did with modernity. For Chance, spending his entire life in the mansion and educated by tv, he was mentally out of place with the outside world as Bloomberg is in flyover country or among anybody who makes a living with their hands.
Bloomberg was raised and continued to live in an urban cocoon. Born in a Boston neighborhood, raised in Medford, Mass., and afterward attended Johns Hopkins and Harvard, Bloomberg went into high finance at Salomon Bros. on Wall Street before he founded Bloomberg, Inc., in New York City. It’s safe to say that not much dirt ever got under his fingernails. Yet, he confidently pontificates on the alleged superiority of air-conditioned office occupants over the millions of hard workers in pickup trucks travelling the fields of the American heartland. Similarly, another Dem huckster, Joe Biden, with a wave of the hand, condemned the fossil fuel industry and totalitarianly announced that all its workers would be transformed into coders. Frankly, it’s nauseating.
Check out this interview with Victor Davis Hanson on this subject and others (click on the Hanson picture below). I don’t agree with Hanson on everything, but I think he hits the mark here.
RogerG