A Bit of Cultural Mythology

Brother Ed is a dirt-grubbing peasant.

That’s my social background. Not blue-collar, but brown-collar, at best. Yes, I managed to get a really great education, because I went to college back in the days when state and federal government was passing out big grants. All you had to do was make the grade, and I didn’t suffer from any goofball sense of entitlement.

America doesn’t have a genuine upper class. We have some insufferably snotty rich folks with massive educations, but they remain some version of cultural bourgeois. We do have a strong element of DIY cowboy ethic in there, but most of the wealthy and powerful remain elitist petty snobs. They like to imagine themselves as upper class. And maybe the European upper class is no cultural marvel today, but it takes a special blindness to ignore the difference between upper class culture and that of the merely wealthy.

The current massive SJW whining about micro-aggression is hardly mainstream. However, it is also little more than a caricature of how most “respectable Americans” tend to think. In other words, the whining is over-the-top, but essentially the same culture. Americans have a very poor tolerance for sarcasm directed at them personally. If you can find acceptance into some in-group, you’ll get away with it more, but whining about offense is simply the essence of what we are.

And it’s just crazy how easy it is to get over that. Most people who become aware of the virtues of social resilience — not taking yourself too seriously — have little trouble moving down that path. It’s too obvious. But it seems increasingly rare that you’ll find someone with the good sense to simply laugh when another party says something preposterous about him.

Sometimes you just wanna growl at someone: “Grow a pair!”