Put down your weapons, culture warriors

I grew up in a small town in a red state. Today I am such an elitist that I consider Brie and Chablis a bit old-school (yet serve it with pasta strained through a Walmart colander. Because one should never pay more than $4.88 for a colander).

With one foot in each world, I must say that what Judith Warner wrote in today’s New York Times about the Fairfax, VA Sarah Palin rally * brought to light a variety of, ahem, “inconvenient truths.”

In no particular order.

Some liberals fear the unwashed masses:
I was isolated, too, because, unable to find the press area in the crowd of about 15,000, I was out with the “real” people.


Mr. Law and Order preaches to the choir:
Fred Thompson had warmed up the crowd, his familiar old district attorney’s voice restored to full bombast, and he’d been in fine form, denouncing – to loud boos from the crowd — the “lawyers and scandal mongers and representatives of cable networks” (aren’t these the people who can afford to live in Fairfax?)

Imagine a Republican saying this about an Obama rally:
I’d planned to make attending the McCain/Palin event a silly sort of adventure.

Kids these days are going to hell in a handbasket, regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum:
We talked about the moral vacuity of modern parenting. “I see extreme spoiling, self-absorption,” she said. “Constant bringing the kids up to love themselves without reflecting on how they affect others.” We talked about the disastrous lack of respect that children now show adults and institutions, and about the ways this lack of respect translates into a very ugly sort of lack of decorum and a lack of basic manners.

Condescending attitudes don’t win hearts and minds:
Businessman Scott Maclean on the Democratic Party: “Their attitude is: you don’t get it and they don’t expect you to get it because they’re smarter than you – and I hate that.”

Will the latte swillers and gun freaks ever get along? Stay tuned over the next six weeks and find out.

* Some dude named John McCain was present as well.