Friday, October 14, 2016

Being looked down upon by one's obvious inferiors

Peggy Noonan's WSJ piece today has three main points: post-America's decadent leadership class is seen as an easy mark by the world stage's unsavory characters, that leadership class has abnegated any claim to being worthy of respect, and it's a bunch of snobs who look down on everybody else.

Here's her treatment of point three:

The big fact of the week, however, has to do with these words: They don’t like us. The Democrats, progressives and left-liberals who have been embarrassed by the latest WikiLeaks dump really hate conservatives, or nonleftists. They don’t like half the people of the country they seek to control! They look at that half with disdain and disrespect. Their disdain is not new—“bitter clingers,” “basket of deplorables.” But here it’s so unashamed and eager to express itself.
A stupid man from a leftist think tank claimed the most “powerful elements” in the conservative movement are Catholic. “They must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations,” he wrote. Mrs. Clinton’s press aide Jennifer Palmieri responded: “I imagine they think it is the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion. Their rich friends wouldn’t understand if they become evangelicals.” 
When I read that I imagined a conversation with my grandmother, an immigrant who was a bathroom attendant at the Abraham & Straus department store in Brooklyn. Me: “Grandma, being Catholic is now a step up. It means you’re an aristocrat! A stupid one, but still.” Grandma, blinking: “America truly is a country of miracles.” 
Here’s what you see in the emails: the writers are the worst kind of snobs, snobs with nothing to recommend them. In their expression and thoughts they are common, banal, dumb, uninformed, parochial. 
I don’t know about you but when people look down on me I want them to be distinguished or outstanding in some way—towering minds, people of exquisite sensibility or learning. Not these grubbly poseurs, these people who’ve never had a thought but only a sensation: Christians are backward, I saw it in a movie!
It’s the big fact of American life now, isn’t it? That we are patronized by our inferiors.
And their moral hollowness is now the norm, the paradigm. We are the outliers.

17 comments:

  1. As a Catholic I was taught you might not like what you find if you read others' mail. Is there no privacy any longer?

    ReplyDelete
  2. John Halpin who wrote the allegedly offensive emails is Catholic himself and explains, and I believe him and wholly accept what he says. Only a cradle Catholic can know I guess.

    https://thinkprogress.org/wikileaks-halpin-catholics-f09c798ba99d#.luhdsgp4d

    ReplyDelete
  3. Halpin said, “Many of the most powerful elements of the conservative movement are all Catholic (many converts) from the [Supreme Court] and think tanks to the media and social groups.”

    “It’s an amazing bastardization of the faith,” he added. “They must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations and must be totally unaware of Christian democracy.”

    Palmieri then allegedly responded that some conservatives are Catholic because they think it’s “the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion.”

    Donald Trump’s campaign in particular latched onto the emails, declaring them to be “anti-Catholic” and holding a conference call with press to denounce them. During the call, Jim Nicholson, a Trump surrogate and former U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican, said the emails “offended me as a Catholic—it left me gasping to hear them say these things in such a shameful, callous way.” Other Trump surrogates then demanded that Clinton fire Palmieri, and uneven Trump supporter Newt Gingrich implied that the exchange was the product of “arrogant left-wing atheists.”

    The Trump campaign’s response to the leaks, however, did not appear to acknowledge that Halpin is himself Catholic, or that the majority of American Catholics lean progressive on many issues. ThinkProgress reached out to Halpin for comment. This is his response.

    Ibid

    ReplyDelete
  4. So that offends Trumpster Jim Nicholson, former Ambassador to the Vatican and current New Orleans secretary of Veteran's Affairs. He's a West Point graduate. And apparently can't take criticism it appears. Many of us are much bigger than that.

    ReplyDelete
  5. And it certainly doesn't take much to be a bigger man than Trump.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Your former hero Newt Gingrich's Catholic adventure began with his 3rd wife. Many of his ilk, like Douthit who spouts shit about our current Il Papa, are converts. Talk about being hijacked. Many of these apostates think Hillie is the devil with the split tail, but hey, she remained married. That sure sticks in their craw too. What is Trump supposed to do about abortion now?

    ReplyDelete
  7. "I have always been a very spiritual person," Callista Gingrich told the Christian Broadcasting Network this year. "I start each day with a prayer, and pray throughout the day, because I am grateful for the many blessings that God has bestowed upon us."

    Mrs. Gingrich, who is Newt Gingrich's third wife, is a devout Catholic who sings in the professional choir at the the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. After they married in 2000, Gingrich began attending Mass practically every week to watch her perform.

    "And I was doing that as a supportive husband, and it sort of caught up with me in a way I could never imagine," Gingrich told the Catholic TV network EWTN.

    ReplyDelete
  8. I wouldn't follow Gingrich across the street either.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Your Teddy boy went the other way, from cradle Catholic to fundie. So did Mike Pence, but he now calls himself an evangelical Catholic, probably to please his mommy.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Never heard the term evangelical Catholic. I guess that means he's serious. Compared to what?

    ReplyDelete
  11. Trump is trying to do what he usually does, vilify, and his bots are biting. I guess it got a little spooky in Cincy last nite with his bots booing the national press. That's another thing your ilk started. You should be ecstatic. Here's the rest of the story about what that "stupid man from a leftist think tank" wrote in a private email your ilk is frothing about:

    I’ll provide that context here.

    My email to my colleagues was in response to an article in The New Yorker by Ken Auletta on Rupert Murdoch. The author starts off with an account of “an exclusive 18-page spread” in another magazine covering the baptism of Murdoch’s children in Jordan, with celebrities attending including Nicole Kidman and Ivanka Trump, and then proceeds to talk about Murdoch’s relationship with then-managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, Robert Thomson.

    Now I don’t care that Murdoch and Thomson raise their kids Catholic. Catholics have great values and a Catholic upbringing provides good guidance about how to live one’s life.

    What I reacted to in my email, rightly or wrongly, was the grand public display of Catholicism from a right-wing billionaire who owns a media conglomerate, including Fox News, that routinely assaults the values of the poor, sows racial discord, and attacks immigrants. This seemed inconsistent with what I was taught about Catholic values, so I penned off an email to my other Catholic colleagues.

    Likewise, the email I wrote is from April of 2011, just after Paul Ryan released his second budget plan proposing large tax reductions for the rich, severe cuts in social welfare spending, the privatization of Medicare, and the repeal of health care for millions of low-income people — all ideas promoted by Thomson’s newspaper and all concepts that were in my mind and in public discourse at the time.

    Rep. Ryan and other conservatives often defend their libertarian economic policies as consistent with the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, a dubious link that many Catholics reject. Subsidiarity is a valuable concept for both progressives and conservatives shaping public policy. Anti-poverty and other social welfare efforts are best handled in smaller, more communal settings. But Catholic social teaching is clear that subsidiarity is not the same thing as federalism and central governments play an important role in helping those in need and advancing societal goals. Policies based on subsidiarity must also be balanced with principles of solidarity and the common good.

    So, I’m a progressive Catholic who was reacting in a private email to the arguments of leading conservatives who often misuse Catholicism to defend their agenda. Liberals can be just as guilty of this as conservatives. That’s what makes Catholic social teaching powerful — it doesn’t fit squarely within in any one party or ideological movement.

    This email wasn’t an exposition on the nature of people’s faith or an expression of contempt for people of faith. It was simply a fleeting reaction from within the Catholic tradition to something I read. That’s the context of this email, none owhich has been reported in media accounts that erroneously accuse me of being an anti-Catholic bigot in an attempt to attack my former colleagues for political purposes.

    All the individuals in this email chain are respectful and tolerant people who are being unfairly slandered in a fake scandal based on out-of-context accounts of a stolen email exchange I started long ago.

    ReplyDelete

  12. Here’s what you see in the emails: the writers are the worst kind of snobs, snobs with nothing to recommend them. In their expression and thoughts they are common, banal, dumb, uninformed, parochial.

    I don’t know about you but when people look down on me I want them to be distinguished or outstanding in some way—towering minds, people of exquisite sensibility or learning. Not these grubbly poseurs, these people who’ve never had a thought but only a sensation: Christians are backward, I saw it in a movie!

    It’s the big fact of American life now, isn’t it? That we are patronized by our inferiors.
    And their moral hollowness is now the norm, the paradigm. We are the outliers.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Well, he admits to being parochial, as in you know, the full Monty of indoc.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Ungh, ung thumpie thumpie shisskum, ahh......that's the sound of the man workin' on da left, uhm uh um,,,,the sensation is the fascination and it's all I ever knew and all you ever hope to know!

    ReplyDelete
  15. What is "Christian democracy"? Is the truth of the Gospel something to be voted on?

    ReplyDelete
  16. What is "Christian democracy"? Is the truth of the Gospel something to be voted on?

    ReplyDelete
  17. Well that truth of the Goapel has often been in dispute. Humans eventually biped it out of where the truth doesn't exactly fit their vision. Some want to hang onto the translated and retranslated words of a former serial killer of early Christians. Just try loving your neighbor as yourself. You and/or your ilk kinda trump for Christian dictatorship it seems to me, dragging out the Thou Shalt Nots in any controversy in which citizens doing no harm to their brethren are guilty as charged in the Big Book they thump.

    ReplyDelete