Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye by Florence King

Author:Florence King [King, Florence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Humour, writing, Politics
ISBN: 9780312039783
Amazon: B007RP7C7U
Goodreads: 851571
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Published: 1990-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chinks in America’s egalitarian armor are not hard to find. Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism.

Equal opportunity is good, but inborn talent is better as long as you don’t say so out loud. Americans worship creativity the way they worship physical beauty—as a way of enjoying elitism without guilt: God did it.

Contempt for manual labor is a big factor in the shoddy manufacturing that has contributed to our trade imbalance. Only an American union leader would say, as Samuel Gompers did: “The promise of America for the laboring man is the promise of someday no longer having to work with his hands.” If Mary McGrory’s home repairmen are slapdash and surly, it’s because they agree with him.

The happy many who own their own homes are the brahmins in that caste nightmare known as the American Dream. If America is suffering from a shortage of rental housing, it’s because nobody wants to rent to renters. Checking the own block instead of the rent block on forms and applications is our way of dividing the wheat from the chaff. Apartment has become a dirty word; the few really nice buildings left strive for such euphemistic names as “towers” or “complex.” The apartment dweller is one jump up from the trailer dweller and the gap is narrowing by the minute.

Everybody’s gotta right to be a landed gent, so ruro-mania is back, if it ever left. “Lot” is out and “acreage” is in, “nearest neighbor” is in and “next-door neighbor” is out, and millions of white-collar Americans rationalize their purchase of a pickup truck by repeating “They’re fun to drive” over and over until they believe it.

Ruromaniacs like to attribute their bucolic tic to their unquenchable pioneer spirit, but since we all know that Americans have less pioneer spirit than a Byzantine grand vizier, there must be another reason. The sage of the twenties, William Allen White, nailed it when he wrote: “Why are Americans so country-minded? We are Emporians all, because we desire to belong to the governing classes.”

The accurate maxim, “the masses love a lord,” has found a cracked way to coexist with American democracy. Mother Nature being the first and most unyielding of aristocrats, we have set ourselves the task of preserving her shrinking peerage. The residents of a New England town get up at dawn to fuss over beached whales like ancient Hawaiian minions stoking a 400-pound queen. If a land developer with a roll of shopping mall blueprints under his arm had the misfortune to show up while these ichthyological obeisances are in full throttle, he might well be lynched. Developer and growth have become euphemisms for “too many people”; our pseudo-egalitarian closet misanthropes practice hatred of humanity and call it conservation.

We persist in believing that gambling is a gentleman’s vice open only to people like Count Vronsky, who knew it was comme il faut to pay his gambling debts at once and let his tailor wait. Whenever state lotteries come under discussion, the tendency of poor people to spend too much on tickets invariably arises.

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