The LA Weekly reviews 'What's Wrong With Kansas' and bashes white male conservative bloggers for being who they are. There's nothing wrong with bashing white males, but there's something a little weird about bashing white males for being wrong when you don't highlight what's right about those who are not. It all seems a bit essentialist to me.
I can't say that I read enough of Lileks, Sullivan and Taranto to know if they are indeed pontificating tightwads as author Thomas Frank suggests. But I don't understand what's so white about that. Perhaps the following is a clue:
Frank can explain them, these entitled but curiously persecuted Tucker Carlsons of the paramedia, because he might have been one himself. Having grown up in Mission Hills, Kansas, a tidy suburb just over the border from Kansas City, Missouri, Frank admits he had been lulled into the notion of a classless society by play dates with millionaires’ children. He spent his adolescent years as “a bitter self-made man” in training, constructing debate-team “dis-ads” against liberalism (“any argument worth its salt had to end with the other team’s plan somehow precipitating a nuclear war”), and classifying businessmen as working-class because, after all, they worked for a living. When one of his fellow debaters announced he planned to pursue a political future as a Democrat because “that was the party of the working class,” Frank took it hard.“I remember the moment he said this with the perfect frozen clarity that the brain reserves for great shocks: Pearl Harbor, 9/11 . . . Class conflict between workers and businessmen?”
It wasn’t until college that Frank finally got religion: While his peers landed sweet summer jobs in their dads’ friends’ banks, Frank, a workingman’s son, was consigned to dreary summer temp work “designed to show me the round of boredom and frustration that is most people’s lot in life.” Other boys went off to Ivy League schools; Frank had to settle for Kansas University, where even the fraternities — reserved for young men from “a dominant class with its middle finger in the air to the world” — didn’t want anyone so low on the social ladder. In time, he was disabused of his classless fantasies and “did a very un-Kansas thing: I started voting Democratic.”
Sounds like a personal problem to me. Not having enough privilege to satisfy his own ambition, he attacks the idea of privilege. Not very sporting of him. But I suppose if you want to lay underemployment at the feet of The Man you will have a lot of company. Not exactly an orginal idea. Hell, I'm underemployed and I know it's The Man's fault. Why oh why aren't wealthy people making me rich? The story of my life. But what exactly does this have to do with the blogosphere? That's where I lose the thread.
Chalk it up to another jab at Ann Coulter. Lord only knows why she's worth mentioning. I mean it's not as if she couldn't be abducted from Conservatism and videotaped in bondage. I think some creative and gutsy people might like to ransom her in exchange for a troop withdrawl of the VRWC. No? Well, then if it's not that deep, then we ignore.
The other day, I was informed that a blog with only 300 hits a day was considered tiny. Hell, I thought I was a Large Mammal. But that informant may be right after all. This has got to change. We non-whitemale bloggers need more attention.
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