Michelle Cottle is on fire in the New Republic, in her excellent expose of the fake boorishness that surrounds George Bush and George Allen (the latter still smarting from his
macaca quip). She notes that Allen, the rich California kid, has been playing at being a rednceck for years, and that his choice of the word "macaca" shows that he can't even get his racial insults right. But she has a broader point to make:
"And what never ceases to amaze me is how pretenders like Bush (eternally aiming for good ole boy status) and Allen (with even grander pretensions of redneckdom)
always seem to latch on to the less admirable aspects of the breed."
With Allens, it's faux-confederacy, and that all goes with it. With Bush, it's even worse:
"Less overtly offensive but equally obnoxious is Bush's I-never-put-much-stock-in-book-learnin' shtick: Doesn't follow the news. Doesn't pay attention to so-called experts and other pointy-headed types. Doesn't bother himself with policy details. Goes with his gut. Blah blah blah. This sort of reverse snobbery may have been the most common and least admirable trait among the true good ole boys I knew. These were the type of men who would sink thousands upon thousands of dollars into the piece of crap truck they took mud-bogging every Saturday but claim poverty when it came time to pay for their kids' college education. These people weren't just ignorant; they were proud of their ignorance--snickering about how going to a good college just made folks uppity."
She concludes:
"Unfortunately, you make a lousy role model for the vast majority of Americans, who, sadly, don't have a rich, well-connected, exceedingly forgiving daddy to bail their butts out every time they get busted for drunk driving, need a safe place to sit out a war, or manage to drive an oil company into the ground."
Kind of sums it up, doesn't it?
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